Two receive presidential honors for research

Two university professors today, Oct. 24, received the nation’s highest honor bestowed upon scientists in the early stages of their careers.

Susan Hagness, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering; and Jenny Saffran, an assistant professor of psychology; were among 59 faculty honored with 2000 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers during a White House ceremony today. The awards, in their fifth year, recognize some of the nation’s top junior researchers and also help advance the leading frontiers in scientific research.

“This is a tremendous honor for both the individuals and the university, since having two winners in a year is quite rare,” says Virginia Hinshaw, dean of the Graduate School and senior research officer. “Early financial support is critical to faculty, and these awards will help Susan and Jenny take their already promising careers to a new level.”

Hagness and Saffran were recognized for both their research and their teaching innovations and both will receive five-year, $500,000 awards.

“This award gives me the freedom to be creative and really take our research into new directions,” Hagness says.

Hagness is working on technology that could bring astounding new speed to computing and electronic communications. She says scientists are reaching what she calls “the tera era,” or an age in which transmission rates for fiber optic communications may break the terabit per second mark.

A terabit is 1 trillion bits per second.

The research field of nanotechnology is exploding nationally, and recent advances in materials technology and fabrication techniques are making it possible to design “photonic microstructures” that are fractions of the width of human hair in size. Hagness is working to understand how light travels within these structures, a key step before they can be applied in a new generation of integrated circuits.

In the classroom, Hagness is working to reverse the paradigm of “in-class lecture and out-of-class problem-solving.” She uses interactive multimedia-based lectures, combined with small-group problem-solving sessions, to help students visualize and understand complex material.

Saffran is working in another wide-open frontier of science, that of understanding how infants learn and process the world. Her primary focus has been on the innate and learned mechanisms babies rely on to recognize words, and on the connections between music and learning.

“We’ve only recently had the methodology to scientifically measure the cognitive process for infants, and this award is a sign of increased recognition of the field,” she says.

The next stage for Saffran’s research is to study how all of the different cognitive processes work together in children, such as learning language, speaking and interpreting knowledge. Some of the most important applications will be for children who are developing atypically, she says. The work may lead to interventions that can help children overcome difficulties in learning language.

Saffran’s teaching innovations include new ways of extending the research experience to undergraduate students. She teaches a course on child development that enrolls 200-plus students, and she has proposed training gifted undergraduates in her course to lead discussion-group sessions and serve as “junior graduate students.”

Saffran and Hagness were nominated for this award by the National Science Foundation, their primary funding source. The NSF is one of nine federal agencies that shared award winners this year.

“These awards acknowledge much more than past performance,” says NSF director Rita Colwell. “They represent our expectation that these women and men will continue to provide leadership in science, engineering and higher education well into the millennium.”