VOLUME 13, NO. 3     June 2001

CAREER advancement

Germano S. Iannacchione, assistant professor of physics, is WPI’s newest CAREER award winner. Part of the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, the NSF’s most prestigious junior faculty honor, encourages their professional growth.

Iannacchione will receive $94,100 in the first year and a total of $499,683 over five years to support his research, "Random Disorder in Phase Transitions of Complex Fluids," which explores the changes that result from bringing disorder into nature. He will conduct a systematic research survey of the changes that liquid crystals and special polymers undergo when nonrelated materials are introduced into their environment.

Iannacchione earned a B.S. and an M.S. in physics at the University of Akron and a Ph.D. in physics at Kent State University. He joined the WPI faculty in 1998 after two years as a postdoctoral research fellow at Kent State and two years as a postdoctoral research associate at MIT.

Over the past six years, 10 WPI faculty members have received CAREER awards. Three other professors received NSF Presidential Young Investigator and NSF Young Investigator awards, which preceded the current program. WPI’s newest Fulbright

Kaveh Pahlavan ’79 (Ph.D.), professor of electrical and computer engineering, was the first person to receive the new Fulbright-Nokia Scholarship. Established in 2000, the scholarship is given to a wireless communications scholar for research at a Finnish university. Pahlavan spent a total of 3-1/2 months between May 2000 and January 2001 at the University of Oulu, Finland, where he lectured and conducted research on wireless indoor communications and geolocation networks. In 1999, he became the first non-Finn to receive a Nokia Fellowship.

An internationally known pioneer in wireless communications, Pahlavan has 150 technical publications and two patents to his credit. He has given invited lectures at 12 universities in 10 nations. With Allen Levesque ’57, he authored Wireless Information Networks (John Wiley & Sons), the first comprehensive textbook on WIN systems.

A member of the WPI faculty since 1985, Pahlavan earned a master’s at the University of Tehran and a doctorate at WPI. He is founder and director of WPI’s Center for Wireless Information Network Studies, a research center for the study of broadband and wireless personal and mobile local area networks.