Eight professors from the University have been awarded faculty fellowships by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, or NCSA, for their outstanding skill in their relevant areas of research.

Amanda Lombardo, Senior Research Coordinator for the Research and Education Directorate at NCSA, said the program “provides opportunities for faculty and researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to develop long-term research collaborations between departments, research units, and NCSA.”

In addition, Lombardo said the fellowship “provides seed funding for start-up projects and activities around research, development, and education.”

Among the professors awarded a fellowship is Stephen Downie from the School of Information Sciences.

Downie expressed that he is thrilled to have been selected for this program and looks forward to the experience.

“It’s fantastic,” he said. “It’s great to be chosen to work with the great colleagues.”

Downie’s project is, according to the NCSA website, “to evaluate and train reduced-dimensional term-topic matrix models for generalized use, inferring the implicit patterns of word co-occurrence in different languages,” which, as Downie simply put, means he will be analyzing several books.

This is of course not the only research project that is aided by the NCSA.

Engineering professor Dallas Trinkle now has the chance to do research in his own field of interest. Trinkle, who has been at the University for 11 years, explained that this program has opened up the opportunity to utilize and enhance ideas that have been germinating for years.

The other professors who received this fellowship include Patricia Gregg, Anita Chan, Zeynep Madak-Erdogan, Ruby Mendenhall, Andre Schleife and Zhizhen Zhao. Over the course of the next year, each fellow will be doing their unique research in the office space provided to them by NCSA.

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