Engineers Land $800,000 in NSF Grants for Environmental and Wireless Projects

Wednesday, April 8, 2009 | Source: Capital Gains

Two engineering professors at Michigan State University (MSU) have each won $400,000 grants from the National Science Foundation.

Jongeun Choi’s work uses robots to monitor the changing environment. Jian Ren’s experiments focus on wireless developments. Both scientists commit to sharing their work with kindergarten through twelfth grade students over the next five years.

“Due to recent drastic global climate changes, it is necessary to monitor the changing ecosystems over vast regions on land, in our oceans, and in our lakes,” Choi explains. His robots will work to predict and trace harmful algal blooms in lakes, toxic contaminants in public water systems, and pollutants in the air.

During summer residential programs sponsored by the College of Engineering’s Diversity Programs Office and others, underrepresented students in kindergarten through twelfth grade will be able to try out some of the biologically inspired robots such as those that mimic flocking birds or swimming fish that Choi has developed in his lab.

Ren’s research targets communications between various wireless devices by enabling them to find unused frequencies. He hopes to develop a platform for e-commerce, national security, environmental protection, health monitoring and more. His work, too, will be shared with K-12 students, with a goal to increase the cybersecurity and wireless networking skills of the workforce.

Choi received a BS in mechanical design and production engineering from Yonsei University at Seoul, Republic of Korea, in 1998. He received his MS and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 2002 and 2006.

Ren earned his BA and MS from Shaanxi Normal University in China in 1998 and 1991. He received a PhD degree in electrical and computer engineering from Xidian University in 1994.