Rice varsity award for Indian scientist

HOUSTON, TX — Ashok Veeraraghavan, an Indian American professor at Rice University, and his research group received a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award on March 20.

The five-year grant to Veeraraghavan is for $549,000, said a Rice University release.

The NSF awards CAREER grants to young scientists who show the potential for leadership in their fields.

Veeraraghavan specializes in the use of computer technology, statistics and sophisticated algorithms to see both farther and deeper, and at increasingly sharper resolution.

The NSF grant will help his lab build a signal processing framework that should improve existing imaging systems for standard cameras and help design new ones to see deeper into nature with enhanced microscopes, and farther out through consumer cameras, remote sensing, machine vision and surveillance applications.

Veeraraghavan is also part of the Scalable Health Initiative at the university that seeks to advance sensing systems that can help diagnose health in remote locations, another area in which small, compact devices are essential.

He has a B.Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, Chennai; and an M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.