Cohan, Igoshin win NSF CAREER Awards

Daniel Cohan and Oleg Igoshin, assistant professors in the George R. Brown School of Engineering, have been awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Awards.

The NSF CAREER program offers prestigious awards to junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellence in education and the integration of education and research.

Cohan, in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will receive $497,000 over five years to fund research by undergraduate and graduate students to investigate how the atmosphere responds to changes in pollutant emissions. He hopes the research will lead to new methods to quantify long-term emissions trends and evaluate how ozone and particulate matter responds to those trends.

The grant also will allow Houston-area 5th-grade students to explore meteorology and air pollution in their own communities. Students will conduct measurement experiments to investigate how weather and pollutant conditions vary on their school campuses.

Before joining the Rice faculty, Cohan worked as an air quality expert for the Georgia Environmental Protection Division and was a Fulbright Scholar in Australia. He earned a doctorate in atmospheric sciences from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2004 and received a bachelor of arts in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1998.

Igoshin, Department of Bioengineering, will receive $640,000 over five years to conduct research into bacteria and mechanisms of how such organisms “self-organize” into swarms or biofilms.

“Studies into their formation and mechanisms are very important from industrial and public health perspectives, since bacterial pathogens are a major scourge in causing infections and harming water and food quality,” Igoshin said.

He hopes to use the grant to expand systems biology education and attract diverse students, including postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, undergrads and local high school teachers and students.

Igoshin did a postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical engineering at the University of California, Davis. He earned a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a master’s degree in chemical physics from the Feinberg Graduate School at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He earned a bachelor of science degree in physics from Novosibirsk State University in Russia.

Dwight Daniels, Engineering Communications and Shawn Hutchins, Bioengineering