Two professors have earned 1995 Faculty Early Career Development Awards from the National Science Foundation.
The awards recognize Dr. Lesia Crumpton of Industrial Engineering and Dr. Anthony Skjellum of Computer Science for teaching and research activities.
Crumpton will earn $200,000 over the next four years to support her research in workplace designs for the disabled. Since coming to Mississippi State in 1993, she has developed undergraduate and graduate courses in ergonomics, a field that studies the interaction between humans and other systems.
Skjellum is receiving $95,000 over three years to develop complex computer software for parallel processing. He teaches courses in advanced systems, parallel scientific computing, and operating systems, among others. He taught the first course at Mississippi State that focuses on C++, an advanced programming language.
Crumpton is working with a local industrial partner to show that disabled workers can perform tasks such as data entry, lifting and lowering, and sorting and transportation with no loss of efficiency.
She also established a laboratory at Mississippi State to study improved designs that will allow the full employment of disabled workers. "We want to develop a comprehensive approach to workplace and work task design for the disabled," she said. "Our goal is to help remove the stereotypes about disabilities."
She received a start-up grant from NSF in 1994 to launch the research.
Skjellum is continuing work that he began with start-up funding from the National Science Foundation/Mississippi State Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation.
Systems software developed by Skjellum and a Mississippi State research group in cooperation with the Argonne National Laboratory now is widely used by research labs, agencies, industry, and universities around the world.
"The NSF Career Award is intended to support the science that will solve the next level of problems using this technology," Skjellum said.
He is building the infrastructure for computer programs that will direct from 10 to 1,000 processors working simultaneously on large-scale problems. The work has applications for any problem that involves parallel processing, such as the sophisticated radar in cockpit systems, the design of airplanes, and plant simulations for industry.
Crumpton holds bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in industrial engineering from Texas A&M University. Skjellum earned bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology.
This World Wide Web version of MSU Memo was modified and updated by Chris Brown.
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Last modified: Friday, 14-Jun-2002 15:58:59 CDT.
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