January 8, 2007 - The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is proud to announce that Assistant Professor, Farinaz Koushanfar is the recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development  (CAREER) Award. The CAREER award is NSF's most prestigious honor for junior faculty members.  Established in 1995, the grant helps top performing scientists and engineers early in their careers to develop their contributions and commitment to research and education.

Through this research, Coordinated Data-Driven Modeling and Optimization for Wireless Sensor Networks, Koushanfar’s team will address the need for comprehensive monitoring and analysis of complex environments for wireless sensor networks.  The focus will be on the development of novel data-driven modeling methods, scalable modular structures, and application optimization algorithms that comprehensively abstract, capture, and operate on traces of deployed wireless sensor networks. It will result in applicable models, development tools, and system software, that simultaneously advance the theory and practice of statistical modeling and optimization algorithms and will lead the efforts for devising standards for wireless sensor network data structures.

This intrinsically interdisciplinary project engages several undergraduate and graduate students. The research results and educational materials will be included in academic publications, the Connexions® platform, and other Internet resources.

Farinaz Koushanfar received her BSEE in 1998 from Sharif University of Technology, MSEE in 2000 from the University of California, MA in Statistics, University of California, in 2004 and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005.  Her research interests include sensor networks, wireless embedded systems, as well as optimization and statistics.  For more information, visit Koushanfar web site.