White House Names Three from Caltech Faculty as Presidential Early Career Award Winners

PASADENA, Calif.—Three members of the faculty at the California Institute of Technology have been named among the most recent winners of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The honor was announced today by the White House.

The three are Babak Hassibi, an electrical engineer who studies data transmission and wireless communications system; Mark Simons, a geophysicist who specializes in understanding the mechanical behavior of Earth using radar and other satellite observations of the motions of Earth's surface; and Brian Stoltz, an organic chemist who specializes in the synthesis of structurally complex, biologically active molecules.

Hassibi was cited by the White House for his "fundamental contributions to the theory and design of data transmission and reception schemes that will have a major impact on new generations of high-performance wireless communications systems. He has nurtured creativity in his undergraduate and graduate students by involving them in research and inspiring them to apply new approaches to communications problems."

An associate professor of electrical engineering at Caltech and a faculty member since 2001, Hassibi earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Tehran in 1989, and his master's and doctorate degrees from Stanford in 1993 and 1996, respctively. He is the holder or coholder of four patents for communications technology, and is the winner of several awards, including the 2002 National Science Foundation Career Award, the 1999 American Automatic Control Council O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, the 2003 David and Lucille Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, and the 2002 Okawa Foundation Grant for Telecommunications and Information Sciences.

Simons, an associate professor of geophysics, combines satellite data with continuum mechanical models of Earth to study ongoing regional crustal dynamics, including volcanic and tectonic deformation in Iceland, crustal deformation and the seismic cycle in California, Chile, and Japan, and volcanic and tectonic deformation in and around Long Valley, California. He also uses the gravity fields of the terrestrial planets to study the large-scale geodynamics of mantle convection and its relationship to tectonics.

Simons earned his bachelor's degree at UCLA in 1989, and his doctorate from MIT in 1995. He was a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech for two years before joining the faculty in 1997.

Stoltz has been an assistant professor of chemistry at Caltech since 2000. He earned his bachelor's degree at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1993, his master's and doctorate degrees at Yale University in 1996 and 1997, respectively. Before joining the Caltech faculty he spent two years at Harvard University as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Postdoctoral Fellow. His work is aimed at developing new strategies for creating complex molecules with interesting structural, biological, and physical properties. The goal is to use these complex molecules to guide the development of new reaction methodology to extend fundamental knowledge and to potentially lead to useful biological and medical applications.

Stoltz, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, is the recipient of a Research Corporation Cottrell Scholars Award, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award, and the Pfizer Research Laboratories Creativity in Synthesis Award. Additionally, he was named as an Eli Lilly Grantee in 2003 and has won a number of young faculty awards from pharmaceutical companies such as Merck Research Laboratories, Abbott Laboratories, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Roche. At Caltech he won the 2001 Graduate Student Council Teaching Award and Graduate Student Council Mentoring Award.

The PECASE awards were created in 1996 by the Clinton Administration "to recognize some of the nation's most promising junior scientists and engineers and to maintain U.S. leadership across the frontiers of scientific research." The awards are made to those whose innovative work is expected to lead to future breakthroughs.