Baldo, Barzilay, Madden and Perreault are selected for 2013 Faculty Research and Innovation Fellowships

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Department Head Chandrakasan announced today that the Faculty Research and Innovation Fellowship (FRIF) recipients for 2013–2014 are Marc Baldo, Regina Barzilay, Samuel Madden, and David Perreault. The FRIF is given to recognize senior EECS faculty members for outstanding research contributions and international leadership in their fields. Each Fellow will receive a three-year award totaling $60k (i.e., $20k per year for 3 years) to be used at the faculty member’s discretion for support of new or ongoing research projects. 

Professor Baldo's research focuses on building inexpensive and highly efficient organic light emitting devices and solar cells. His seminal contributions hinge on engineering the spin of excitons, which are quasiparticles of energy that mediate the emission and absorption of light within organic semiconductors. He has mixed excitons to quadruple the efficiency of LEDs, and split excitons to obtain more than one electron per photon in solar cells. Marc is currently the director of the Center for Excitonics at MIT. He is a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at MIT.

Professor Barzilay studies how computers can understand and generate human language. She develops models of natural language, and uses those models to solve real-world language processing tasks. Her research enables the automated summarization of documents, machine interpretation of natural language instructions, and the deciphering of ancient languages.  She is acknowledged to be a world leader in computational linguistics.  She is a wonderful mentor to her students, who have received recognition within MIT and internationally for their doctoral theses and their research. She is a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Professor Madden works on databases and computer systems. His research ranges over data management, live sensing, and networking, and he is broadly known for his contributions in sensor data management (TinyDB and CarTel) and database storage (C-Store and H-Store). Professor Madden is a leader in the data management community, with a number of award papers in top conferences over the past few years. His recent research efforts include crowd-sourced database, data management for the cloud, and interactive data visualization. He leads the BigData@CSAIL initiative and directs the Intel Science and Technology Center (ISTC) in Big Data.  He is a member of CSAIL.

Professor Perreault’s research focuses on the design, manufacturing, control and application of power electronics.  He has made outstanding contributions to the development of power converters operating at very high frequencies and in their use to benefit efficiency and performance in renewable energy, lighting, communications, computation and transportation.  He is co-founder of Eta Devices, a startup company focusing on high-efficiency RF power amplifiers. Professor Perreault is a Fellow of the IEEE and co-author of six IEEE prize papers. He is a member of both the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and RLE at MIT.