Vol. 19, No. 30

May 10, 2000

Engineering prof receives outstanding faculty award

Dennis W. Prather, electrical and computer engineering, has been selected by the College of Engineering to receive the 2000-2001 Outstanding Junior Faculty of Engineering Award. Faculty members are nominated by the chairpersons of the college's five departments and the winner is selected by the named professors of the college. The award comes with a $5,000 prize for professional development, which Prather said he would use to buy research equipment. "This just caps off a storybook experience in my three years at UD," Prather said. Since coming to UD in 1997, Prather has been awarded more than $3 million in research grants and won the National Science Foundation Career Award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award and in February, received the W.J. Kastner Technical Achievement Award for research that has made "a considerable technical contribution to the Naval Research Laboratory and the U.S. Navy." In his nominating letter, Gonzalo R. Arce, electrical and computer engineering, wrote, "Dennis is one of the best engineering junior faculty in the country. By any measure, he excels in research, in teaching and in service." Prather has been a UD faculty member since receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in computational electromagnetics. Soon after joining the faculty, he established the Applied Optic and Electromagnetics Laboratory, where he and his students carry out their research. Specific areas of research include theoretical and numerical simulation of electromagnetic fields in the analysis of passive optical devices and developing optical systems with applications in signal and image processing and parallel computing. Prather's most recent project focuses on developing a diffractive optical system that can be used in processor-in-memory (PIM) CPUs, allowing the transmission of information from component to component at the speed of light. A recent award of $500,000 from the Department of Defense will allow Prather to complete the experimental phase of the CPU optical element network. Once that is done, the chip will have to be integrated into the rest of the PIM system. He estimates it will take two years before the CPU optical system is ready to be manufactured. - Barbara Garrison