René Vidal, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, received a 2009 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award for “An Optimization Framework for Simultaneous Object Categorization and Segmentation.” The Young Investigator Program exists to recognize outstanding new faculty members at institutions of higher education, support their research, and encourage their teaching and research careers.

Three members of the Whiting School faculty received 2009 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards, which are given in recognition of young scientists’ commitment to research and education. Noah Cowan, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the award for “Sensory Guidance of Locomotion: From Neurons to Newton’s Laws”; Jeff Gray, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, received the CAREER award for “Structure Prediction of Proteins on Solid Surfaces”; and Rachel Karchin, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, received the award for “Modeling Missense Mutation”.

The Homewood Academic Council recently approved the promotion of four Whiting School faculty members. Allison Okamura in Mechanical Engineering has been promoted to professor. Promoted to associate professor are Hai-Quan Mao in Materials Science and Engineering, and David Gracias and Jeff Gray in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.