Five promising young faculty members at UC Santa Barbara have received prestigious CAREER awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early career development of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.

The NSF explains that CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative proposals that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.

The financial awards, which are estimated and not guaranteed, will be paid out over a five-year period, according to the NSF. The winning UCSB faculty members and their projects follow:

	Song-I Han, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry

•Song-I Han, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, will receive around $450,000 to develop novel contrast mechanisms for nuclear magnetic resonance that highlight molecule-specific functions of materials and processes with targeted signal enhancement of selected molecules in fluids.

•Todd H. Oakley, assistant professor of ecology, evolution, and marine biology, will receive nearly $480,000 for a project titled “Exploring Congruence of Fossil and Molecular Estimates of Macroevolutionary Divergence Times in Ostracoda (Crustacea).”

•Volkan Rodoplu, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, will receive approximately $400,000 to develop methodologies for tracking and disseminating quality of service metrics in mobile, wireless networks of microprocessor-sensor devices.

•Todd Squires, assistant professor of chemical engineering, will receive about $400,000 for a theoretical and experimental program that involves the development of microfluidic systems.

•Tommaso Treu, assistant professor of physics, will receive around $430,000 for a project titled “Dark Matter and Black Holes Over Cosmic Time.”

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