Four faculty members at UC Santa Barbara have received prestigious early career awards from the National Science Foundation.

The Faculty Early Career Development Program offers coveted NSF awards in support of early career development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.

NSF explains that these awardees are selected on the basis of creative proposals that integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organizations. The plans are expected to build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education, and winners receive funding.

The financial awards will be paid out over a five-year period. Winning faculty members and their projects are:

• Jeffrey W. Bode, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, will receive $575,000 to develop catalytic methods for the synthesis of organic molecules, and to apply the new reactions to the synthesis of biologically active peptides and natural products.

• Patrick S. Daugherty, assistant professor of chemical engineering, will receive $400,000 to develop experimental approaches for the analysis and engineering of biomolecular interaction specificity in complex, multi-component systems.

• Ram Seshadri, assistant professor of materials, will receive $466,272 for his fundamental research on why certain magnets are half metals while others are not, and on how new half metals could be designed from scratch. (Half metals are a class of magnetic materials that shows great potential in spin-based electronics, where electrons’ spin rather than the charge is manipulated.)

• Timothy P. Sherwood, assistant professor of computer science, will receive $400,000 to develop specialized architectures and algorithms for security processing on high throughput memory tiles.

The National Science Foundation promotes and advances scientific progress in the United States by competitively awarding grants and cooperative agreements for research and education in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering.