Engineering professor gets
foundation's Career Award

Javier Garcia-Frias, electrical and computer engineering, has received a National Science Foundation Career Award for his research into improving the quality of wireless communications.

The five-year, $300,000 award will allow Garcia-Frias to continue researching methods for reducing errors in the transmission of digital information through wireless communications. Errors are responsible for degraded transmissions.

The NSF award is for his work on iterative decoding for fading channels. His research interests are in the area of information processing. They include wireless, iterative decoding schemes, joint source-channel coding and applications in bioinformatics.

Garcia-Frias joined the UD electrical and computer engineering faculty in 1999, after receiving a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles.

He also is affiliated with the Delaware Institute of Biotechnoloy (DBI), a partnership among state government, Delaware's institutions of higher education and area industry to promote leading-edge scientific research, provide biotechnology-based education and support economic development. He became affiliated with DBI for his research into communications information processing, including data analysis and information extraction, specifically, in the application of probabilistic models, such as hidden Markov models, stochastic grammars, and bayesian networks, as tools for information discovery and modeling.

He did his undergraduate and graduate work in Spain, receiving combined bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and combined bachelor's and master's degrees in Mathematics from Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid.

In 1992, and from 1994 to 1996, he was with Telefonica I+D, the research laboratories of the Spanish phone company.

In 1993, he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Terminación de Estudios Universitarios by the Spanish government, awarded to only three electrical engineering students in the nation. That year, he also received a fellowship from the Spanish government to perform doctoral studies at Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros de Telecomunicación, in Madrid.

–Barbara Garrison

Physicist named American
Physical Society fellow

Krzysztof Szalewicz, physics and astronomy, has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).

The society commended Szalewicz for his contributions to theories and calculations that describe interactions between atomic and molecular systems. His calculations defining the behavior of intermolecular forces, responsible for the existence of liquids and solids, may help to demonstrate physical phenomenon such as why ice is less dense than water. His theoretical research will enable the scientific community to better understand how substances act under extreme conditions, when experiments under these conditions would have been difficult to perform.

The society also commended Szalewicz for his examination of atoms and molecules containing "exotic" particles such as muons and antiprotons. His calculations were instrumental in determining the feasibility of using muons to catalyze nuclear fusion.

APS also cited Szalewicz for his work relevant to high-energy physics in determining the mass of neutrinos. Neutrinos are atomic particles with such weak interactions that they easily flow through everything on Earth. Some scientists theorized that neutrinos could be the foundation of the dark mass of the universe. Szalewicz's calculations have been used to interpret measurements demonstrating that neutrino mass is not large enough to contribute significantly to dark matter.

Each year, APS elects only one-half percent of the membership of the society to the status of fellow. The program was created to honor members who have made advances in knowledge through original research and publication; significant and innovative contributions in the application of physics to science and technology; and significant contributions to the teaching of physics.

APS represents its more than 40,000 members in national, international and governmental affairs; the publication of scholarly journals, national, divisional and regional meetings; and programs in physics education and outreach; and it monitors the human rights of scientists around the globe.?Szalewicz came to UD in 1988 from the University of Florida where he was a research scientist with the Department of Physics Quantum Theory Project. Before that, he was an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Warsaw.

In 1979, he won the Poland Minister of Higher Education award for achievements in scientific research and, during his career at the University of Warsaw, he won the president's award four times.

He has held visiting scientist positions at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Joint Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, the Department of Quantum Chemistry at the University of Uppsala, Sweden and at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cologne, Germany.

He received a doctor of science degree from the University of Warsaw in 1984.

–Barbara Garrison