ANN ARBOR—Three University of Michigan faculty members are among 60 nationwide to receive Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their careers.

The awards “recognize young scholars, research contributions, their promise and their commitment to broader social goals, and are designed to help the government meet the goals of producing the finest scientists and engineers for the 21st century and maintaining U.S. leadership across the frontiers of scientific research.”

U-M recipients are Timothy A. McKay, assistant professor of physics; Ann M. Sastry, assistant professor of mechanical engineering; and Michele S. Swanson, assistant professor of microbiology and immunology.

McKay’s award supports both teaching and his participation in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a collaboration of more than 200 scientists from eight institutions in the United States and Japan.

The SDSS, the most ambitious astronomical survey project ever undertaken, will bring modern approaches to mapping to cosmography, the science of mapping the universe and determining our place in it.

The SDSS will systematically map one-quarter of the entire sky, producing a detailed image of it, and determine the position and absolute brightness of more than 100 million celestial objects. It also will measure the distance to 1 million of the nearest galaxies, yielding a three-dimensional picture of the universe through a volume 100 times larger than that explored to date, McKay notes. It also will record the distances to 100,000 quasars, the most distant objects known, giving us an unprecedented hint at the distribution of matter to the edge of the visible universe.

Sastry notes that environmentally-conscious electric cars require high-performance battery materials, human peripheral nerves must be treated to promote regrowth when damaged by disease, and reinforcements in polymeric composites must be optimally designed for processability and performance.

Sastry is conducting research that is answering fundamental questions about the way the fibrous materials in all of these applications behave. Her work has allowed investigation of the behavior of fibrous materials using a novel, theoretical framework that incorporates material variability in a computationally efficient methodology for prediction of performance.

Swanson, in addition to teaching clinical microbiology courses for medical students and infectious disease courses for undergraduates, is engaged in research to define the molecular interactions that determine the fate of microbes in macrophages, white blood cells that efficiently kill most microbes, using Legionella pneumophila pathogenesis as a model system.

While a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology and Microbiology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Tufts University, Swanson applied a combination of genetic, molecular and cell biological techniques to study L. pneumophila growth in macrophages.

Federal agencies that support the Presidential Early Career Awards include the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Transportation and Veterans Affairs; the Environmental Protection Agency; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and the National Science Foundation.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey

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