Esteemed and award-winning Rice DSP alum Marco Duarte has accepted an Assistant Professor position at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A prestigious NSF IPAM Postdoctoral Fellowship at Princeton and Duke Universities enabled him to work with Prof. Robert Calderbank.

Duarte received his B.Sc. with distinction and his M.Sc. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison; he received his Ph.D. from Rice with Prof. Richard Baraniuk as advisor. He has published and presented widely, and is the co-inventor on several patents. Duarte’s areas of interest include signal, image, and data processing using sparse, compressible, and manifold signal models.

President Obama today named Rice ECE professor Farinaz Koushanfar as one of 85 researchers to receive the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

"Science and technology have long been at the core of America’s economic strength and global leadership," President Obama said. "I am confident that these individuals, who have shown such tremendous promise so early in their careers, will go on to make breakthroughs and discoveries that will continue to move our nation forward in the years ahead.”