A million for research...
Two assistant professors at the Thayer School of Engineering have been awarded prestigious new National Science Foundation (NSF) grants which may bring as much as $1 million in research funds to Thayer during the next five years. B. Stuart Trembly and Daniel R. Lynch are among 100 recipients of the newly-created President's Young Investigator Awards. Initiated to address the nation's shortage of highly-qualified engineering faculty due to waning research funds and competition from industry for top candidates the awards are targeted for faculty who have received their doctorates within the past seven years.
Trembly, a 1975 Yale graduate who completed his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Thayer in 1982, plans to use the award to continue his research on the applications of electrical engineering to biomedical problems such as cancer therapy or visison problems. Lynch, a member of the Thayer faculty since 1978, earned a Ph.D. in civil engineering that same year from Princeton and B.S. and M.S. degrees from MIT in 1972. He intends to apply the finite ejements method of computer analysis solving complicated equations by breaking them down into smaller elements to a broad spectrum of science and engineering problems.
According to the terms of the Presidential Awards, Trembly and Lynch will each receive $25,000 a year in research funds for up to five years. The NSF also will provide up to $37,500 in additional funds each year on a dollar for-dollar matching basis with contributions from industrial sources. Both professors say they expect no difficulty in attracting the matching funds that will provide them each with a total of $500,000 over five years for equipment, graduate research assistants, and other expenses.
For Dartmouth's modest-sized engineering school to attract two of these coveted awards, especially when competing with faculty from 250 engineering schools, "is an obvious statement of the quality of faculty Thayer School has been able to attract," said Dean Carl F. Long. "This award is important in the freedom it will give the young investigators."
Lynch already has plans to expand his work in numerical methods into such new areas as developing computer methods of learning more about groundwater pollution. He feels that groundwater pollution "is the single most significant environmental problem of this century" and yet has not attracted adequate research funds because both the problem and potential solutions take years to develop and yield results.
In a different field, Lynch is applying his numerical methods to hyperthermia cancer therapy, an experimental method of destroying cancer cells with heat. In a method called regional hyperthermia, Lynch and physicians at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital are experimenting with a heating unit to surround a patient's body that would send microwave heat to the tumor area. He wants to develop computer methods to take information from diagnostic equipment on each patient, feed it to a computer, and then plan the therapy.
Trembly is also researching hyperthermia cancer treatment, but from an electrical engineering perspective studying the use of thin microwave antennas for insertion directly into the tumor as a method of applying heat. Along with physicians at Hitchcock, Trembly is studying such factors as what microwave frequency to use, depth of tissue penetration, how to apply the heat evenly, and how to use more than one antenna at a time to produce better results.
Trembly and physicians also are exploring the feasibility of applying similar heating technology to reshape the eyeball to correct for common vision problems such as myopia or astigmatism. Researchers have found that elevated temperatures cause the corneal tissue in the eye to contract, which then causes the eyeball to reshape; this method avoids the risks of a surgical procedure known as radical keratotomy which is widely practiced in Europe and involves cutting the corneal tissue to cause it to contract and reshape.
