Dr. Xiaodong Michael Shi, assistant professor in the C. Eugene Bennett Department of Chemistry, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award worth $550,000 – the largest amount to date at West Virginia University for this particular grant.
Only about 425 faculty members in the nation receive the CAREER award each year.
Shi’s research, entitled “CAREER: Developing 1,2,3-triazole skeletons as novel chiral building blocks in asymmetric catalysis,” could be instrumental in advancing drug design, fine chemical production, and new material synthesis.
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, education and the integration of education and research.
Over the next five years, Shi will examine the 1,2,3-trizole chemical as a new building block in the formation of transition metal complexes and synthesis of multi-functional chemicals. These compounds will become catalysts in important chemical transformations applicable to biomedical and material investigations that could revolutionize health care, biosensor, and energy industries.
As part of the CAREER grant funding, Shi will also develop an educational plan that incorporates international study-abroad experiences in China to train science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate students in nanotechnologies, material synthesis and medicinal chemistry.
In addition to study-abroad opportunities, Shi will offer a new course, called “Molecular Recognition in Nanotechnologies,” open to all undergraduate and graduate science students to improve STEM education. He hopes to increase the participation of underrepresented groups by preparing them for the work force with skills that contribute to and shape a science and engineering-based economy.
Shi is also a WVNano Initiative faculty participant, West Virginia’s focal point for nanoscale science, engineering and education (NSEE) research, workforce development, and economic development.
He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry from Nankai University, China in 1994 and 1997. He received a doctoral degree from the University of Maryland in 2002 and was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of California at Berkeley.
Past NSF CAREER grants
In 2008, two WVU faculty members received the prestigious NSF CAREER award –
Daryl Reynolds, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering, and Sergei Urazhdin, an assistant professor of physics.
Dr. Daryl Reynolds received about $400,000 over a five-year period. He was recognized for his work to optimize wired and wireless communication networks. Currently, wired and wireless networks are optimized separately from the start, Reynolds said, who specializes in multimodal network optimization. Optimizing them together will improve network performance.
The NSF award has also helped Reynolds support two graduate students to assist with his work, buy software, equipment and computers, travel to conferences and cover other research expenses.
Reynolds is a native of Houston, Texas and received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his master’s and doctorate in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University. He has been on the WVU faculty since 2002.
He is the co-director of WVU’s Wireless Communications Research Laboratory, which serves as the hub for research activity by WVU students and faculty in the area of wireless communications. Currently, the lab supports four full-time faculty members, approximately 15 graduate students, and a small number of undergraduates.
Dr. Sergei Urazhdin, assistant professor of physics since 2005, was awarded $513,297
from the NSF for his proposal to enhance science education at WVU and across the state of West Virginia. He has organized and directed summer science camps at WVU for middle school students in 2008-09.
He also plans to encourage graduate and undergraduate student involvement in nanoscience research and promote diversity, especially among rural West Virginia populations.
Through the award, Urazhdin has been researching the effects of unexpected phenomena on tiny magnetic devices by leading the WVU Spintronics Group.
Urazhdin earned a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in physics from Rostov State University in Russia and a doctorate in physics from Michigan State University.
In 1998, Dr. David Lederman, a WVU professor of physics, received an NSF CAREER grant for $309,500 over a three-year period (later extended to five years) for his research project titled, “Surface and Interface Properties of Antiferromagnetic Heterostructures.”
The results helped contribute significantly to a basic understanding of very small magnets, which can be used to understand more complex systems that have important applications in magnetic storage and magnetic sensor applications. These materials are of interest to scientists because they have simple structures, which can be modeled by a computer.
Lederman’s NSF CAREER grant also created science outreach and recruiting programs in West Virginia to prepare students for the technology-based economy of the 21st century.
Lederman is interim director of the WVNano Initiative at WVU. He received the Eberly Arts and Sciences Outstanding Researcher Award in 2004 and the Woodburn Professor Award in 2004-2006.
He earned his doctorate in physics from the University of California-Santa Barbara in 1992 and his Bachelor of Science in physics from Stanford University in 1988.
For more information about the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, go to http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503214.
Visit http://research.wvu.edu/ for more on research at West Virginia University.
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