MEMS Student Wins Kennedy Fellowship
Arta Sadrzadeh, a graduate student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, has won the second annual Ken Kennedy–Cray Inc. Graduate Fellowship Award, which supports graduate students involved in high-performance computing.
Founded last year with a $150,000 grant from the supercomputer manufacturer Cray Inc., the fellowship is named in honor of the late Ken Kennedy, a Rice computing pioneer who served on Cray’s board of directors and founded the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology, which recently was named in his honor.
Sadrzadeh works in the lab of mechanical engineering and materials science professor Boris Yakobson. His research focuses on the geometrical, mechanical and electronic structures and electron-transport properties of nanostructures such as pure boron fullerenes and nanotubes, which might find applications in targeted drug delivery, neutron cancer therapy and hydrogen storage. Sadrzadeh and Yakobson also have studied the use of carbon nanotubes as electro-chemical gas sensors, and they are investigating the potential of quantum wires for long-range energy transmission.