Other promising Utah scientists who were awarded "Young Investigators" awards by the National Science Foundation are Thomas P. Beebe Jr. and Janice J. Trautner.
Trautner, originally from St. Louis, is an assistant professor who teaches structural engineering in the University of Utah's department of civil engineering. She is interested in structural integrity of steel connections."I think the connections are weak links in the structure," she said. "When they go, it could be disastrous."
Infamous failures of walkways and bridges are often the result of breakdowns in the connections. Connections are made up of several components, she added. "They're connected in series. The bolts are connected to plates, the plates are connected to welds . . . If one of the links goes, that's it."
One common problem is that fasteners on big steel structures can come apart with high dynamic forces. Fasteners can "come undone, and the thing falls apart, the crane falls off," she said.
She hopes to use the NSF award to delve more deeply into such questions, perhaps getting a student assistant. She is also interested in helping encourage women to work in the civil engineering profession.
Beebe, a chemistry professor at the U., came from Pennsylvania. He is investigating the interaction of molecules on surfaces.
The area of his research is a different field of chemistry than the reactions of chemicals in solutions.
Groups he works with use exotic equipment - the scanning tunneling microscope and an atomic forces microscope - to visualize the positions of individual atoms.
"One of the projects that we're working on has to do with determining the sequences of bases in the DNA molecule," he said.
Presently, DNA molecules can be visualized through the use of radioactive substances, jells and enzymes. The sequencing process is relatively slow.
If it were possible to look directly at a DNA molecule through a sophisticated microscope, it might be able to sequence it directly, by seeing which atoms were connected where.
But there's a roadblock. "The DNA molecule is a large, floppy molecule that moves around" when scientists try to study it.
So Beebe and his teammates are looking at ways to immobilize the molecule so that it can be studied. In recent work, they have placed sulfur atoms in a DNA molecule, finding that the sulfur reacts with a gold surface.
The reactions pin down the DNA molecule so scientists can attempt to photograph it.
Another project by the team is to make small pits, or containers, for molecules on the surface of a host material.
Beebe hopes to continue researching throughout the lifetime of the grant. The NFS grant is especially good because it isn't tied to a particular project, so he can change directions if needed.
"I've been quite successful so far in getting almost all of my matching money already, so I shouldn't have trouble with that," he said.