Andrea Bertozzi, a recent faculty addition who obtained tenure in Duke's department of mathematics at age 29, received a prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers Monday during a White House ceremony.
Bertozzi's award is "the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers," according to a statement by the National Science and Technology Council.
The presidential awards, the statement said, "are intended to recognize some of the finest scientists and engineers who, while early in their research careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge during the 21st century."
An associate professor who began teaching at Duke during the fall term, Bertozzi had already won an Office of Naval Research ( ONR) Young Investigator Award - which is providing her with $100,000 a year for three years to advance her research in areas of applied mathematics.
The ONR award has "been very helpful for me here at Duke," she said in an interview. "I'm supporting one graduate student this year, and I'll support two next year. We've been able to get some really great, state-of-the-art computing facilities for the students to use. And we'll be able to send them on conferences to give talks."
Andrea Bertozzi web page:http://www.math.duke.edu/faculty/bertozzi |
"The ONR views strong departmental support for the individual as one factor in the selection process," she said. The White House award will add two more years of support to her ONR funding, meaning that the combined award could total as much as $500,000 over five years.
Bertozzi's research interests include nonlinear partial differential equations, fluid dynamics and interface motion all mathematical topics that can have very practical applications.
Interface motion refers to conditions at the boundary between regions of a physical system that are dynamically different. One example is the boundary between air and liquid in a thin film coating process. She said she has been modeling such thin films since 1992, work that typically requires simultaneously solving multiple equations that describe evolving changes.
Examples of these thin films range from a drop of liquid spreading on a surface to a jet of fluid being ejected from a nozzle. Such mathematical problems have important industrial and engineering applications, ranging from the de-icing of airplane wings to the coating of microchips and the design of inkjet printers.
Part of her ONR-funded research deals with "fingering instabilities" in thin films. "For instance, you're trying to paint a wall in your house, and you start at the top, knowing that gravity is going to start pulling the paint down the wall," she said.
"What you'd like to do is just paint a big long strip at the top and let it all slide down. But we know that doesn't work. What the paint does instead is move into little fingers, which then form rivulets, which will make big long drips on your wall instead of one nice uniform coating."
To explore this fingering problem - a solution to which would strongly interest paint manufacturers - she has collaborated with Michael Brenner, an assistant professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "We found out that there was a whole aspect of mathematical stability theory that had been ignored," she said.
Their paper will appear in the journal Physics of Fluids in early 1997.
Bertozzi received her own higher education from Princeton University after being bitten by the math bug in early youth. "I started participating in the math team when I was in junior high school," she recalled. "I used to get them to give me old tests so I could take them home and work out the problems. This was fun for me."
As a Princeton undergraduate, she majored in math but also took plenty of physics courses. She stuck with math, receiving her Ph.D. from Princeton in 1991. But "having an interest in physics made applied mathematics a very natural area for me to work in," she said.
After Princeton, she went to the University of Chicago as a Dickson instructor in mathematics and a National Science Foundation post doctoral fellow. Early in 1995, she was offered a tenured position at Duke mathematics department, which she finds to be "a good environment for students and a good environment for young faculty to do research," she said.
Bertozzi has just begun teaching at Duke, a role that she said her department takes very seriously. This past fall, she taught a graduate course called "Introduction to Incompressible Hydrodynamics," which provided a "mathematical perspective" to a subject that is also of great interest to engineers. In fact, one student from the biomedical engineering department also took the course and "did very well," she reports.
Next spring, she will begin co-teaching a two-part Scientific Computing course with mathematics professor John Trangenstein.
Scientific computing involves the programming techniques that allow computers to numerically solve analytic models for difficult research problems. Real world examples include climate and ocean modeling, as well as groundwater flow in hydrology.
An important part of this course will involve "hands on" training in graphical user interfaces, machine arithmetic and the use of publicly available software from the World Wide Web.
Bertozzi's father, William, is an MIT physics professor; and a younger sister, Carolyn, is now an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley.
"We have a pretty scientific family, but we all have somewhat different interests," she said.
"When someone does something well we're there rooting for them. But we really don't talk shop so much when we get together."