08/09, Dr. Zhao receives prestigious NSF CAREER Award.

Dr. Danella Zhao, Assistant Professor in the Center for Advanced Computer Studies (CACS), has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), setting a new record of three active NSF CAREER Awards at CACS.

As a recipient of the prestigious award, Dr. Zhao receives $621,230 over the next five years for her research to explore a new on-chip communication system, dubbed Wireless Network-on-Chip (WNoC), aiming to replace wires with chip-based wireless radios for increasing accessibility, improving bandwidth utilization, and eliminating delay and crosstalk noise in conventional wired interconnects. The success of this research can lead to breakthroughs in on-chip communication and broadly benefit the next generation giga-scale many-core system-on-chip development.

Prior to the CAREER Award, Dr. Zhao has received an NSF MRI grant to establish the Nano-Electronics Embedded Computing Laboratory, which houses the state-of-the-art equipment for various prototyping and evaluation activities to demonstrate the applicability and feasibility of WNoC.

According to the NSF, the "Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research."