IRVINE : Research Grants Won by Two at UCI
Two UC Irvine professors have been awarded prestigious National Science Foundation grants reserved for the most promising young scientists and engineers, university officials announced Wednesday.
Theoretical chemist Craig C. Martens and evolutionary biologist Steven A. Frank have been chosen to receive the foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator Awards. The awards, given annually to 200 young U.S. scientists, can mean up to $100,000 in annual research funds and equipment for five years.
“They are meant especially for new Ph.D.s who are as yet unestablished but clearly are doing the highest quality research and publications, and Steven is certainly one of those,” said Richard MacMillen, chair of UCI’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, who nominated Frank for the award.
Frank, 32, who studies the evolution of genetics systems, the role of learning in natural selection and the genetics of disease, also has won a $350,000, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Martens, 31, who came to UCI last August with the highest recommendations for exceptional scholarship, research ability and creativity, is the only chemist in California to receive the presidential award this year. His research seeks to unravel the complex interactions of atoms and to explain how energy flows between molecules.
Marjorie C. Caserio, chair of UCI’s chemistry department and the one who nominated Martens, said that in addition to sponsoring beginning researchers, the NSF grant aims to make the recipients attractive candidates for industry support and promote the transfer of technology and information.
Award winners receive a base of $25,000 a year for five years. They also are eligible to receive up to $37,500 a year to match dollars or equipment they receive from private industry.
“It’s a great honor,” Martens said of the NSF award.
The matching component of the grant “gives me the opportunity to approach computer companies . . . to try to get more of a discount on hardware, or more hardware,” added the assistant chemistry professor, who came to UCI after a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his doctorate at Cornell University in 1987.
Like Martens, much of Frank’s work also depends on computer modeling. The NSF and NIH awards will provide needed dollars to maintain the sophisticated computer equipment he uses to study how patterns of disease evolve in wild populations of plants or organisms. The money also will help pay for research collaborators.
Frank, who received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1987, came to UCI last year after completing a two-year post-doctoral fellowship under UC Berkeley evolutionary geneticist Montgomery Slatkin.
