Renaissance Computing Institute

Faculty Fellows Program

RENCI Faculty Fellows Program

The RENCI Faculty Fellows (RFF) Program gives faculty members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill the opportunity to collaborate with RENCI in order to:

Explore new research opportunities and directions,
Translate ideas into technology prototypes,
Develop new community service or educational programs,
Develop interdisciplinary projects that combine the arts and humanities with science.

The RFF is designed to catalyze new activities or projects not eligible or suitable for funding from traditional sources. It is not meant to fund or support a continuation of a faculty member’s current research nor to provide release time for independent exploration.

Fellows will have access to RENCI high-performance computing, storage, visualization and data management/analysis capabilities, and sensors and hardware prototyping capabilities. They will work in partnership with RENCI staff and research scientists to realize the goals outlined in the faculty member’s proposal. Fellows will have resources to explore and develop new opportunities and multidisciplinary collaborative projects. They will be able to use advanced technologies that RENCI creates and deploys to support discovery, collaboration, education and innovation.

Eligibility
Fellowships are available to full-time Carolina faculty for collaborations of one semester or one academic year. Fellows will be expected to spend a portion of their time in residence at RENCI and to be actively involved with RENCI during their appointment. On completion of their appointment, Fellows will be expected to present a seminar on their project and submit a brief written report.

Fellowship Resources
Fellows are eligible to receive up to $50,000 in support, which may be used for the following:

Reduction in teaching responsibilities (to be negotiated with department head/chair)
Travel support (maximum of $1,500)
Summer salary
Equipment (maximum of $5,000)

Application Process
Faculty Fellows for the 2007-2008 academic year have been chosen. View Call for Proposals.

2007-2008 Faculty Fellows
Catherine Blake
Catherine Blake, assistant professor, School of Information and Library Science. Blake will work with RENCI information retrieval experts to create an information synthesis system, a method for retrieving information across disciplinary boundaries that addresses the differences in semantics and syntax used by different disciplines. Called Claim Jumper, to signify modern-day gold miners searching for nuggets of knowledge on the cyber frontier, the system will automatically generate summaries of information in literature from many disciplines. The system is meant to address the increasing need for information from many disciplines by researchers and practitioners in public health, environmental science, education, genomics, and economics, and other fields.

Charles C. Finley
Charles C. Finley, research associate professor, School of Medicine, department of otolaryngology, joint department of biomedical engineering (UNC and NC State). Finley’s research team will use high-performance computing and advanced visualization tools to improve the design and application of cochlear implants, devices that have helped to restore functional speech understanding in patients with severe hearing losses. Finley will develop patient-specific computational models to determine the final positioning of electrode contacts in the implant that take advantage of the patients’ functioning neurons. These models also will provide insight into the stimulation mechanism that occurs in the cochlea, which could impact the design and fitting of implant devices.

Joyce Rudinsky
Joyce Rudinsky, associate professor, communication studies. Rudinsky is a visual artist who will participate in the Carolina Performing Arts’ Death Penalty Examined project, a season-long campus- and community-wide exploration of death penalty issues. She will work with RENCI visualization and collaborative technologies specialists to create a media installation that will surround viewers with images, and video and audio recordings that offer thoughts and insights on capital punishment. The system will have a spatial tracking system so that when viewers enter the installation, it will track their actions and focus of attention and then use that information to determine what to present next.

Ted Zoller
Ted Zoller, assistant professor, Kenan-Flagler Business School. Zoller aims to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the underlying economic activities that lead to the creation of technopoles—a term used to describe regions and economic development activities in those regions that favor the development of entrepreneurial firms based on advanced technology R&D. Research Triangle Park (RTP) is a technopole, and Zoller’s project will identify the factors that explain firm formation and development in RTP. The data will be analyzed using RENCI’s capabilities in advance visualization techniques, social networking analysis and computational modeling.

Questions
For questions or clarifications, please contact RENCI Deputy Director Alan Blatecky at alan@renci.org or 919-445-9643.