Antonios Armaou, assistant professor of chemical engineering, and Patrick Cirino, assistant professor of chemical engineering, have received grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Career Development (CAREER) Program for their proposals.
According to the NSF, the Career Awards are highly selective grants to new faculty members believed to be the next generation of academic leaders. Awardees are selected on the basis of creative career development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution and build the foundation for a lifetime of contributions to their discipline.
Armaou's five year, $400,000 grant, is titled, "Optimal Operation and Control of Multiscale Process Systems." The objective of this research is to resolve fundamental issues associated with the development of computationally efficient techniques for computing optimal operation and control policies for multiscale processes and systems with well-defined microstructures.
Armaou received his bachelor of science in chemical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and his doctoral degree in chemical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles. He joined Penn State in 2002.
Cirino's CAREER Award is for "Engineering Regulatory Protein Effector Specificity to Facilitate Combinatorial Library Analyses." As part of this work, Cirino will engineer regulatory proteins to develop customized molecular reporters, which in turn will enable the rapid evolution of novel biocatalysts for commercially important reactions.
Cirino received his bachelor of science in chemical engineering from Ohio University and his doctoral degree in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. He joined Penn State in 2004.