Rice DSP alum Justin Romberg has received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the nation's highest honor for professionals at the outset of their independent scientific research careers. He was among the 100  recipients of this award, who were named by President Barack Obama on July 9. The honorees will receive their awards this fall at a White House ceremony.

"These extraordinarily gifted young scientists and engineers represent the best in our country," President Obama said. "With their talent, creativity and dedication, I am confident that they will lead their fields in new breakthroughs and discoveries and help us use science and technology to lift up our nation and our world."

Rice DSP graduate student Marco Duarte has been awarded a prestigious IPAM postdoctoral fellowship. Duarte was among only 45 of the over 800 applicants to receive the award.

Duarte will work with faculty in the Mathematics and Electrical Engineering Departments at Princeton University on new applications of computer science, including machine learning and compressed sensing. Professors Robert Calderbank (Princeton) describes this research as “building mathematical tools to find needles in haystacks.” For example, compressed sensing is an ingenious method for extracting nearly complete information from a large dataset with very few measurements. An outstanding example is the work of Professors Richard Baraniuk and his research group including Duarte at Rice University, on the single-pixel camera, which was recently selected by MIT Technology Review as one of their TR10 Emerging Technologies to Watch.

Rice is challenging Texans' notion that bigger is better, particularly when it comes to security-related research. Rice led Texas' top-tier research universities this month in awards from the Department of Defense's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program, winning new grants worth more than $9 million, or about 3.5 percent of total MURI funding awarded this year.

"This funding will help Rice continue its leadership in researching and developing technology to improve future security capabilities and surveillance systems and better ensure our nation’s safety," said Sen. John Cornyn. "The important work being done at Rice is a source of pride for Texas."

When folks at Rice reach for their cell phones, more than a few know whom to thank.

Groundbreaking research by C. Sidney Burrus, dean emeritus of the George R. Brown School of Engineering and the Maxfield and Oshman Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering, helped make them -- and so much more -- possible.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) knows too and recognized Burrus' accomplishments when it awarded him the 2009 Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal on June 25 at its annual honors ceremony in Los Angeles.

Rice University's Farinaz Koushanfar, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been named to MIT Technology Review magazine's coveted 2008 list of the world's 35 Top Young Innovators. Koushanfar was recognized for developing new techniques that microchip designers can use to fight hardware piracy, a growing problem that's already believed to cost chipmakers several billion dollars per year.

Professor Richard Baraniuk and Professor Yehia Massoud have been awarded a grant totaling $4 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Texas Instruments (TI) has once again chosen Rice University as one of its primary academic partners for research into digital signal processing (DSP). An inaugural member of TI's Leadership University program, Rice's DSP researchers have won a new three-year $1 million grant under the program.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has awarded $2 million to Rice's open-education program, Connexions. The two-year grant -- the fifth from the foundation to Connexions since 2002 -- will allow Connexions to develop a new generation of easy-to-use authoring software and to establish a user consortium to fund the program's future growth.