BATON ROUGE – Tevfik Kosar, a professor in the LSU Department of Computer Science, has received the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award.
The NSF CAREER Award is the foundation’s most prestigious award for junior faculty members. It is part of NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program, which “recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.” CAREER Award recipients are selected on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the missions of their institutions.
Kosar, who holds a joint faculty appointment with the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, proposed a project titled “Data-aware Distributed Computing for Enabling Large-scale Collaborative Science.” NSF will fund this project for five years at $400K.
Through his work on the CAREER grant, Kosar will develop new computing systems that manage data more effectively with automated processes, which enables scientists to spend more time focusing on their research questions and less time dealing with data.
“This project will not only impact computer science research by changing the way computing is performed, but it will also dramatically change how domain scientists perform their research by facilitating rapid analysis and sharing of raw data and results,” Kosar said. “It will help the scientists start thinking about totally new scenarios where simulations are closely coupled with large amounts of observational and experimental data, which would revolutionize science, not just in the new scenarios but in the way it will bring the computational, theoretical, and experimental scientists together which currently live in very different communities and do not interact.”
Kosar’s integrated career plan will impact computational science disciplines from science and engineering to emerging research in the arts, humanities, business and education, which also need to deal with increasingly large amounts of data.
This project also involves education and outreach, as Kosar plans to let undergraduate and graduate students work alongside him in his research. Kosar will incorporate the project into the University’s summer camp and outreach programs to students in the K-12 grades, and he plans to visit with students in Louisiana schools to discuss the project and encourage them to pursue careers in computational science and research.
“NSF selectively awards CAREER grants to young researchers who demonstrate extraordinary promise and a commitment to advancing science, and I am very proud of Tevfik for receiving it,” said CCT Interim Director Stephen David Beck. “I am confident his research will yield results that not only enhance his academic work, but will benefit the greater research community.”
Data storage and management is Kosar’s research specialty at the University. In 2006, he received a $1 million grant from NSF to create advanced data archival, processing and visualization capabilities across the state through the PetaShare project (www.petashare.org).
In December, Kosar led a team of researchers who unveiled a new software package, called Stork Data Scheduler, which makes it easier and more efficient for researchers to access and transfer large data sets (www.storkproject.org).
Apart from his research, Kosar also led a team of educators to develop a science and technology-oriented charter school in New Orleans, which allows students to work collaboratively with universities and be mentored by experienced scientists to enter into national and international science project competitions (www.abramsonst.org).
Kosar will begin work on this CAREER Award this semester.
For more information on CCT research activities, please contact CCT Manager of Public Relations Kristen Sunde at 225-578-3469 or ksunde@cct.lsu.edu.
The NSF CAREER Award is the foundation’s most prestigious award for junior faculty members. It is part of NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program, which “recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.” CAREER Award recipients are selected on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the missions of their institutions.
Kosar, who holds a joint faculty appointment with the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, proposed a project titled “Data-aware Distributed Computing for Enabling Large-scale Collaborative Science.” NSF will fund this project for five years at $400K.
Through his work on the CAREER grant, Kosar will develop new computing systems that manage data more effectively with automated processes, which enables scientists to spend more time focusing on their research questions and less time dealing with data.
“This project will not only impact computer science research by changing the way computing is performed, but it will also dramatically change how domain scientists perform their research by facilitating rapid analysis and sharing of raw data and results,” Kosar said. “It will help the scientists start thinking about totally new scenarios where simulations are closely coupled with large amounts of observational and experimental data, which would revolutionize science, not just in the new scenarios but in the way it will bring the computational, theoretical, and experimental scientists together which currently live in very different communities and do not interact.”
Kosar’s integrated career plan will impact computational science disciplines from science and engineering to emerging research in the arts, humanities, business and education, which also need to deal with increasingly large amounts of data.
This project also involves education and outreach, as Kosar plans to let undergraduate and graduate students work alongside him in his research. Kosar will incorporate the project into the University’s summer camp and outreach programs to students in the K-12 grades, and he plans to visit with students in Louisiana schools to discuss the project and encourage them to pursue careers in computational science and research.
“NSF selectively awards CAREER grants to young researchers who demonstrate extraordinary promise and a commitment to advancing science, and I am very proud of Tevfik for receiving it,” said CCT Interim Director Stephen David Beck. “I am confident his research will yield results that not only enhance his academic work, but will benefit the greater research community.”
Data storage and management is Kosar’s research specialty at the University. In 2006, he received a $1 million grant from NSF to create advanced data archival, processing and visualization capabilities across the state through the PetaShare project (www.petashare.org).
In December, Kosar led a team of researchers who unveiled a new software package, called Stork Data Scheduler, which makes it easier and more efficient for researchers to access and transfer large data sets (www.storkproject.org).
Apart from his research, Kosar also led a team of educators to develop a science and technology-oriented charter school in New Orleans, which allows students to work collaboratively with universities and be mentored by experienced scientists to enter into national and international science project competitions (www.abramsonst.org).
Kosar will begin work on this CAREER Award this semester.
For more information on CCT research activities, please contact CCT Manager of Public Relations Kristen Sunde at 225-578-3469 or ksunde@cct.lsu.edu.
Publish Date:
01-28-2009
