Three computer science and engineering faculty earn NSF Career Awards

University Park, Pa. -- Patrick McDaniel, assistant professor of computer science and engineering; Yuan Xie, assistant professor of computer science and engineering; and Sencun Zhu, assistant professor of computer science and engineering; have received grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Career Development (CAREER) Program for their proposals.

According to the NSF, the Career Awards are highly selective grants to new faculty members believed to be the next generation of academic leaders. Awardees are selected on the basis of creative career development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution and build the foundation for a lifetime of contributions to their discipline.

McDaniel's five-year, $400,000 grant, titled "Realizing Practical High Assurance through Security-Typed Information Flow Systems," will support his investigations in bridging the theoretical and practical gap between systems security and security-typed languages.

McDaniel, the Hartz family career development assistant professor, received a bachelor of science degree in computer science from Ohio University, a master of science degree in computer science from Ball State University and his doctoral degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan. He joined Penn State in 2004.

Xie's five-year, $500,000 grant, titled "Process Variation Aware Embedded MPSoC Synthesis," will help develop process variation aware design methodologies for the synthesis of embedded systems in nanometer-scale complementary metal oxide semiconductor technology.

A faculty member since 2003, Xie received his bachelor of science degree in electronics engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing and a master of science and doctoral degrees in computer engineering from Princeton University.

Zhu's five-year, $500,000 grant, titled "Combating Worm Propagation in Emergent Networks," will draw upon a variety of topics including cryptography, graph theory, mobile systems, networking and statistics in combating vulnerabilities and worm attacks in new computers and systems. The project also will investigate combating the significantly growing trend of worm attacks on emergent networks including P2P networks, cell phone networks and sensor networks.

Zhu received his bachelor of science degree in precision instruments from Tsinghua University, China; a master of science degree in signal processing from University of Science and Technology of China and his doctoral degree in information technology from George Mason University. He joined Penn State in 2004.