PULLMAN The only Northwest recipient of one of the nation's 15 Presidential Faculty Fellow awards in engineering, announced late last week by the White House, said the award will help her accelerate plans to establish a new laboratory in electromagnetics at Washington State University.
Shira Lynn Broschat of WSU's School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science says she will apply the award money toward establishing a Laboratory for Numerical Studies in Wave Propagation and Scattering, her primary area of scholarly interest.
While each award carries a grant from the National Science Foundation of $100,000 per year for five years, Broschat's grant will extend three years because she is a 1990 winner of a Presidential Young Investigator Award, which included NSF funding still in effect.
Faculty fellow awardees will be recognized at two days of festivities surrounding President Bush's annual awarding of the Medal of Science and Medal of Technology June 22 in the Rose Garden of the White House.
''The new laboratory and the graduate students the award will support will help me continue and expand on my research in ultrasound mammography and rough surface scattering from ocean surfaces,'' Broschat said. ''But I also plan to initiate new projects I've been dreaming about.''
One of these, she explained, would ultimately lead to new means for non-destructively testing today's high-tech, composite materials. These materials are used increasingly by industry to replace metal components of aircraft, manufacturing systems, and other equipment and apparatus.
''This is not an award you get totally on your own. I work with exciting, dynamic and creative people, and, as a junior faculty member, I have been treated very well by the institution,'' Broschat said.
