<p>College Physicist Wins NSF CAREER Award</p>
<p>* The National Science Foundation has selected Dr. Tim Mewes, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, for a 2010 CAREER Award totaling $490,000 to conduct research related to improving future electronics.</p>
<p>The award is NSFs most prestigious recognition of top-performing young scientists who are beginning their careers.</p>
<p>Mewes is the seventh College faculty member to currently hold a CAREER Award.</p>
<p>Mewes five-year award will support his research on the properties of magnetic materials, which will be used in future high performance electronic devices, including new and more efficient computer memories and logic devices, such as adderscomponents which add numbers and are found within computers central processing units.</p>
<p>The award will allow Mewes, who also works within UAs Center for Materials for Information Technology, to research key properties of materials to be used in so called spintronic devices.</p>
<p>In spin-based electronics, or spintronics, the spin of electrons, rather than their charge, is utilized to achieve new and improved functionalities. Spintronics has already led to increased storage density for hard drives, but it could also lead to improved computer memories that are fast, dense, and non-volatile.</p>
<p>Spintronics could also bring about logic chips with drastically reduced power consumption.</p>
<p>Mewes will seek a better understanding of magnetization dynamics and its damping in magnetic nanostructures, one of the major challenges to improving spintronic devices.</p>
<p>In the educational component of Mewes project, he will provide research opportunities for local high school students, undergraduate and graduate students.</p>
<p>In addition to Mewes, Dr. Seongsin Margaret Kim, an assistant professor in UAs College of Engineering, was recently awarded a five-year, $400,000 CAREER Award for investigating terahertz technology.*</p>
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