The Presidential Young Investigator Award (PYI) was awarded by the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

of the

United States Federal Government The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a fede ...

. The program operated from 1984 to 1991, and was replaced by the NSF Young Investigator (NYI) Awards and Presidential Faculty Fellows Program (PFF) and subsequently the

NSF CAREER Awards The National Science Foundation CAREER awards, presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF), are in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research and education, and the integration of these endeavors i ...

and the PECASE. Applicants could not directly apply for the award, but were nominated by others including their own institutions based on their previous record of scientific achievement. The award, a certificate from the White House signed by the President of the United States, included a minimum grant of $25,000 a year for five years from NSF to be used for any scientific research project the awardee wished to pursue, with the possibility of additional funding up to $100,000 annually if the PYI obtained matching funds from industry. Considered to be one of the highest honors granted by the National Science Foundation, the award program was criticized in 1990 as not being the best use of NSF funds in an era of tight budgets.

Recipients

PYI award recipients include: *

Narendra Ahuja Narendra Ahuja is an Indian-American computer scientist and the Donald Biggar Willett Professor Emeritus in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His research primarily concerns computer vision and pattern recognition. ...

, computer science, 1984 *

Alice Agogino Alice Merner Agogino (born 1952) is an American mechanical engineer known for her work in bringing women and people of color into engineering and her research into artificial intelligence, computer-aided design, intelligent learning systems, an ...

, engineering, 1985 * Paul Alivisatos, chemistry, 1991 *

Peter B. Armentrout Peter B. Armentrout (born 1953) is a researcher in thermochemistry, kinetics, and dynamics of simple and complex chemical reactions. He is a Chemistry Professor at the University of Utah. Career Armentrout received his B.S. degree from Case ...

, chemistry, 1984 *

David P. Anderson David Pope Anderson (born 1955) is an American research scientist at the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, and an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Houston. Anderson leads the SETI@ho ...

, computer science *

Kenneth Balkus Kenneth J. Balkus Jr. is an American chemist and materials scientist. He is professor of chemistry and former department chair at The University of Texas at Dallas. He is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society and a recipient of the ACS Doherty ...

, chemistry, 1991 *

Prithviraj Banerjee Prithviraj "Prith" Banerjee (born 1960) is an Indian American academic and computer scientist and is currently the Chief Technology Officer at ANSYS and board member at Cray and CUBIC. Previously, he was a Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry w ...

, computer systems architecture, 1987 * Paul F. Barbara, chemistry, 1984 *

Christoph Beckermann Christoph Beckermann is a University of Iowa Foundation Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Iowa. He also directs the Solidification Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering there. Education Bec ...

, mechanical engineering, 1989 * Mary Beckman, linguistics, 1988 * Mladen Bestvina, mathematics, 1988 * Sanjay Banerjee, electrical engineering, 1988 * Jonathan Block, mathematics, 1993 *

Rogers Brubaker Rogers Brubaker (; born 1956) is professor of sociology at University of California, Los Angeles and UCLA Foundation Chair. He has written academic works on social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, religion, diasporas, gen ...

, sociology, 1994 * Robert Bryant, mathematics, 1984 *

Stephen Z. D. Cheng Stephen Z. D. Cheng (born 1949 in Shanghai) is a China, Chinese-United States, American Polymer science, polymer scientist and Chemical engineering, chemical engineer. Cheng is the R.C.Musson & Trustees Professor of Polymer Science, and was the for ...

, polymer science, 1991 * Paul Alan Cox, evolutionary ecology and ethnobotany, 1985 * Judith Curry, climate science, 1988 *

Supriyo Datta Supriyo Datta (born 1954) is an Indian born American researcher and author. A leading figure in the modeling and understanding of nano-scale electronic conduction, he has been called "one of the most original thinkers in the field of nanoscale e ...

, electrical engineering, 1984 * Rina Dechter, computer science, 1991 * Chris Q. Doe, Biology, 1990 *

Bruce Donald Bruce Randall Donald (born 1958) is an American computer scientist and computational biologist. He is the James B. Duke Professor of Computer Science and Biochemistry at Duke University. He has made numerous contributions to several fields in Co ...

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

, 1989 * David L. Donoho, statistics, 1985 * Lin Fanghua, mathematics, 1989 * Juli Feigon, biochemistry, 1989 *

Eric Fossum Eric R. Fossum (born October 17, 1957) is an American physicist and engineer, which with the help of other JPL scientists, co-developed some features of the CMOS image sensor. He is currently a professor at Thayer School of Engineering in Dartm ...

, electrical engineering
1986
* Jennifer Freyd, psychology *

Elaine Fuchs Elaine V. Fuchs is an American cell biologist famous for her work on the biology and molecular mechanisms of mammalian skin and skin diseases, who helped lead the modernization of dermatology. Fuchs pioneered reverse genetics approaches, which ...

, cell biology, 1984-1989 * Gerald Fuller, chemical engineering *

Huajian Gao Huajian Gao (, born December 7, 1963) is a Chinese-American mechanician who is widely known for his contributions to the field of solid mechanics, particularly on the micro- and nanomechanics of thin films, hierarchically structured materials ...

, materials science *

Mark S. Ghiorso Mark S. Ghiorso (born October 21, 1954) is an American geochemist who resides in Seattle, Washington. He is best known for creating MELTS, a software tool for thermodynamic modeling of phase equilibria in magmatic systems. Education Ghiorso earn ...

, geological sciences, 1985 *

Leslie Greengard Dr. Leslie F. Greengard is an American mathematician, physicist and computer scientist. He is co-inventor with Vladimir Rokhlin Jr. of the fast multipole method (FMM) in 1987, recognized as one of the top-ten algorithms of the 20th century. Gr ...

, advanced comp research program and computational mathematics, 1990
Mark Henderson
mechanical engineering, 1987 * Bruce Hajek, 1984 * John L. Hennessy, computer science, 1984 * Jacqueline Hewitt, physics, 1991 *

David Hillis David Mark Hillis (born December 21, 1958 in Copenhagen, Denmark) is an American evolutionary biologist, and the Alfred W. Roark Centennial Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is best known for his studies of molecular ...

, evolutionary biology, 1987 *

John M. Hollerbach John Matthew Hollerbach is a professor of computer science and research professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah. He is the editor of ''The International Journal of Robotics Research'', a Senior Editor of '' Presence: Teleope ...

, haptics and tactile perception, 1984 * Kathleen Howell, astronomy, 1984 *

Ellen Hildreth Ellen Catherine Hildreth is a professor of computer science at Wellesley College. Her fields are visual perception and computer vision. She co-invented the Marr-Hildreth algorithm along with David Marr. She completed all of her higher education ...

, computer vision, 1987 *

Paul Hudak Paul Raymond Hudak (July 15, 1952 – April 29, 2015) was an American musician and professor of computer science at Yale University who was best known for his involvement in the design of the Haskell programming language, as well as several ...

, computer science, 1985 * Christopher R. Johnson, computer graphics and visualization, 1994 * Nan Marie Jokerst, electrical engineering, 1990 *

Moshe Kam Moshe Kam (born October 3, 1955) is an American engineering educator presently serving as the dean of the Newark College of Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Until August 2014 he served as the Robert G. Quinn Professor and de ...

, electrical engineering, 1990 * David B. Kaplan, physics, 1990 * Mehran Kardar, physics, 1989 *

Karen Kavanagh Karen L. Kavanagh is a professor of physics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, where she heads the Kavanagh Lab, a research lab working on semiconductor nanoscience. Education She obtained a BSc in Chemical-Physi ...

, physics, 1991 *

Susan Kidwell Susan M. Kidwell is an American paleontologist and geologist at the University of Chicago. Her research has focused on the relationships between fossil concentrations and sequence stratigraphy, experimental taphonomy, and the implications of ...

, geology, 1986 *

Vijay Kumar (roboticist) Vijay Kumar (born 12 April 1962) is an Indian roboticist and UPS foundation professor in the School of Engineering & Applied Science with secondary appointments in computer and information science and electrical and systems engineering at the ...

, 1991 *

Jacqueline Krim Jacqueline Krim is an American condensed matter physicist specializing in nanotribology, the study of film growth, friction, and wetting of nanoscale surfaces. She is a Distinguished University Professor of Physics at North Carolina State Univers ...

, materials research, 1986 * James W. LaBelle, physics, 1990 * Robert L. Last, plant biology, 1990 * Edward A. Lee, electrical engineering, 1997 *

Kevin K. Lehmann Kevin K. Lehmann (born September 7, 1955, in Newark, New Jersey) is an American chemist and spectroscopist at the University of Virginia, best known for his work in the area of intramolecular and collisional dynamics, and for his advances in the me ...

, chemistry, 1985 * Charles E. Leiserson, computer science, 1985 *

John H. Lienhard V John Henry Lienhard V (born 1961) is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on desalination, heat transfer, and thermodynamics. He has also written ...

, mechanical engineering, 1988 * John Edwin Luecke, mathematics, 1992 *

Udi Manber Udi Manber ( he, אודי מנבר) is an Israeli computer scientist. He is one of the authors of agrep and GLIMPSE. After a career in engineering and management, he worked on medical research. Education He earned both his bachelor's degree in 1 ...

, computer science, 1985 *

Eric Mazur Eric Mazur (born November 14, 1954) is a physicist and educator at Harvard University, and an entrepreneur in technology start-ups for the educational and technology markets. Mazur's research is in experimental ultrafast optics, condensed matter ph ...

, physics * Mark McMenamin, geology, 1988 * Eckart Meiburg, mechanical engineering, 1990 *

Fulvio Melia Fulvio Melia (born 2 August 1956) is an Italian- American astrophysicist, cosmologist and author. He is professor of physics, astronomy and the applied math program at the University of Arizona and was a scientific editor of ''The Astrophysica ...

, astrophysics, 1988 *

Carolyn Meyers Carolyn Winstead Meyers is the former president of Jackson State University. Meyers, a native of Newport News, Virginia, earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Howard University. She earned a master's degree in mechanical enginee ...

, chemical engineering * Michael I. Miller,

biomedical engineering Biomedical engineering (BME) or medical engineering is the application of engineering principles and design concepts to medicine and biology for healthcare purposes (e.g., diagnostic or therapeutic). BME is also traditionally logical sciences ...

* Robert F. Murphy (computational biologist), 1983 *

Monica Olvera de la Cruz Monica Olvera de la Cruz is a Mexican born, American and French soft-matter theorist who is the Lawyer Taylor Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor of Chemistry, and by courtesy Professor of Physics and Astronomy and of Ch ...

, Materials Physics, 1989 *

Jon Orloff Jonathan Harris Orloff (born 1942) is an American physicist, author and professor. Born in New York City, he is the eldest son of Monford Orloff and brother of pianist Carole Orloff and historian Chester Orloff. Orloff is known for his major fie ...

, physics, 1984 *

Randy Pausch Randolph Frederick Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was an American educator, a professor of computer science, human–computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pausch learn ...

, computer science *

Gregory A. Voth Gregory A. Voth (born January 22, 1959) is a theoretical chemist and Haig P. Papazian Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. He is also a professor of the James Franck Institute and the Institute for Biophysic ...

, Chemistry, 1991 * Joseph R. Pawlik, biological oceanography, 1991 *

Ken Perlin Kenneth H. Perlin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, founding director of the Media Research Lab at NYU, director of the Future Reality Lab at NYU, and the Director of the Games for Learning Institute. He ...

, computer graphics, 1991 *

Ronald T. Raines Ronald T. Raines is an American chemical biologist. He is the Roger and Georges Firmenich Professor of Natural Products Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for using ideas and methods of physical organic chemistry to ...

, chemical biology * Lisa Randall, theoretical physicist, 1992 * Eric Sven Ristad, artificial intelligence, 1992 * Mark O. Robbins, Materials Research, 1985 *

Ares J. Rosakis Ares J. Rosakis, Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He was also the fifth Director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, known as (GALCIT), and fo ...

, 1985 *

Karl Rubin Karl Cooper Rubin (born January 27, 1956) is an American mathematician at University of California, Irvine as Edward O. Thorp, Thorp Professor of Mathematics. Between 1997 and 2006, he was a professor at Stanford, and before that worked at Ohio S ...

, mathematics * Rob A. Rutenbar, computer engineering, 1987 *

Sunil Saigal Sunil Saigal ( hi, सुनील सैगल), is an Indian-born American engineer. Education Saigal obtained his bachelor's degree (Civil Engineering) at Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh, India in 1978, obtaining a masters in Structure ...

, civil engineering, 1990 *

Peter Salovey Peter Salovey (; born February 21, 1958) is an American social psychologist and current President of Yale University. He previously served as Yale's Provost, Dean of Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Dean of Yale College. Salovey is ...

, psychology *

Aziz Sancar Aziz Sancar (born 8September 1946) is a Turkish molecular biologist specializing in DNA repair, cell cycle checkpoints, and circadian clock. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich fo ...

, molecular biophysics, 1984 * Robert Sapolsky, neuroendocrinology *

Terrence Sejnowski Terrence Joseph Sejnowski (born 13 August 1947) is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the director of the Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical ...

, neuroscience, 1984 *

Michael Steer Michael B. Steer (born 1955 in Queensland, Australia) is a Lampe professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University and one of the leading electrical engineers in today's analog/RF and microwave world. He has publ ...

, electrical engineering, 1986 *

Joann Stock Joann Stock is a professor at California Institute of Technology known for her research into plate tectonics, particularly on changes in plate boundaries over geological time. Education and career Stock earned her B.S. from Massachusetts Instit ...

, earth science, 1990 *

Howard A. Stone Howard Alvin Stone (born January 19, 1960) is the Donald R. Dixon '69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. His field of research is in fluid mechanics, chemical engineering and compl ...

, chemical, bioengineering, environmental, and transport systems, 1989 *

Steven Strogatz Steven Henry Strogatz (), born August 13, 1959, is an American mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He is known for his work on nonlinear systems, including contributions to the study ...

, mathematics, 1990 *

Éva Tardos Éva Tardos (born 1 October 1957) is a Hungarian mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Tardos's research interest is algorithms. Her work focuses on the design and analysis of efficient ...

, algorithm analysis *

Patricia Thiel Patricia Ann Thiel (February 20, 1953 – September 7, 2020) was an American chemist and materials scientist who served as a distinguished professor of chemistry at Iowa State University. She was known for her research on atomic-scale structures ...

, chemistry, 1985 * Masaru Tomita,

, 1988 *

Mary K. Vernon Mary Katherine Vernon (born 1953) is an American computer scientist who works as a professor of computer science and industrial engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research concerns high-performance computer architecture an ...

, computer science, 1985 * Jeffrey Vitter, computer science, 1985 * Margaret Werner-Washburne, molecular biology, 1990 * Ellen D. Williams (scientist), materials research, 1984 * Martin Yarmush, biochemical engineering, 1988
Todd Yeates
biochemistry, 1991 *

Alex Zettl Alex Zettl is an American professor of experimental condensed-matter physics. His research involving the properties of novel materials has produced significant advances in the field. Biography Zettl received a B.A. degree from the University o ...

, physics, 1984 *

Steven Zimmerman Steven Charles Zimmerman is an American organic chemist who is a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Early life and education He was born in Chicago in 1957, the second son of the organic ...

, chemistry * Munther A. Dahleh, 1991 *

Yannis Ioannidis Yannis Ioannidis ( el, Γιάννης Ιωαννίδης; Istanbul, 1959) is a Greek computer scientist who is the current President of the Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based int ...

, 1991.

NSF Presidential Faculty Fellowship

The NSF Presidential Faculty Fellowship (PFF) program was launched by President George H.W. Bush to honor 30 young engineering and science professors. The awards were up to $100,000 per year for 5 years.

PFF recipients

* David Culler, Computer Science, 1992 * Theodore (Ted) Rappaport, Wireless Communications, 1992 * Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Electrical/Bioengineering, 1992 *

Louise H. Kellogg Louise H. Kellogg (November 18, 1959 – April 15, 2019) was an American geophysicist with expertise in chemical geodynamics and computational geophysics and experience in leading multidisciplinary teams to advance geodynamics modeling and scienti ...

, Geophysics, 1992

References

Federal government of the United States Science and technology awards {{Improve categories, date=January 2021

Recipients

NSF Presidential Faculty Fellowship

PFF recipients

See also

References