Seven get New Faculty Research awards

Seven new tenure-track faculty members at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) will share $62,518 in 2018-19 New Faculty Research (NFR) awards from UAH's Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development.

"We are delighted to be able to award these new faculty research grants and hope that the seed funding provided will result in more external funding opportunities for the faculty supported," says Dr. Robert Lindquist, interim vice president for research and economic development. "Our NFR review committee was highly impressed with the innovative ideas brought forward by our excellent young faculty members."

The NFR program is intended to assist UAH's new tenure-track faculty in securing external funds in support of their scholarly interests. The NFR funds are competitively awarded and require that the faculty write full proposals, which are then assessed by a committee comprised of senior faculty and research staff.

Tenure-track professors who had been at UAH less than three years at the time of proposal submission were eligible. The funds must be spent within one year of the award, and the maximum award is $10,000. Awards were limited to one award per faculty member.

Award winners, their college, center or department and their proposal title:

• Dr. Kimberly Hile, College of Education, "Project WINS: What Inclusion Needs to Succeed"
• Dr. Konstantinos Kanistras, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, "Design and Development of a Morphing Flap for Fixed-Wing Aircraft"
• Dr. Vineetha Menon, Department of Computer Science, "Efficient Knowledge Discovery and Big Data Analytics for Data-Driven Disease Diagnostics in Healthcare Applications"
• Dr. Tauhidur Rahman, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, "Hardware Characterization for Developing Rowhammer-Resistant Electronic Systems"
• Dr. Abdullahi Salman, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, "Data-Driven Resilience Assessment of Road Networks Subject to Natural Hazards"
• Dr. Jennifer Sims, College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Sociology, "How We See Race: Using Eye-tracking Technology to Explore Racial Perceptions"
• Dr. Tatyana Sysoeva, Department of Biological Sciences, "Understanding Development of Antibiotic Resistance in Pathogenic Escherichia Coli: One Regulatory System at a Time"