Sukumar Kamalasadan, assistant professor of Engineering and Computer Technology, has received a prestigious Faculty Early Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). This highly competitive award is the highest honor for young faculty members and is bestowed on those teachers and scholars deemed most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. According to NSF, fewer than 20 percent of the proposals submitted to the annual competition are elected for funding.

Dr. Kamalasadan in the Electronics Lab

"Dr. Kamalasadan's award is well-deserved recognition of his intellect, research background, and character," said Don Chu, Dean of the College of Professional Studies. "We are enormously proud of this individual achievement and look forward to the fruits of future research that this award will help make possible."

Scope of Award

The award provides five years of funding to stimulate the early development of academic careers in science and engineering and to support the critical roles played by faculty members in integrating research and education. The award for the initial year is $79,791, with four additional years of funding bringing the total five-year award to $400,000.

Research Focus

Dr. Kamalasadan will use the projected five-year, $400,000 grant to develop next-generation intelligent control and optimization architectures. The work will be mainly focused on electric power system dynamics optimization and control. "The objective of this research is to develop a new class of intelligent adaptive control architecture with scalable algorithms for complex systems control and optimization," said Kamalasadan. "The approach is to provide unified control framework using adaptive controller and intelligent learning schemes with special emphasis on control of power system dynamics." Dr. Kamalasadan envisions that the proposed project will have a greater impact in seamless integration of renewable and non-renewable energy sources, economic and viable continuous power dispatch, sustainable and transportable next generation energy systems, and security against power disruptions caused by inadvertent events or malicious intent. He mentioned that the project can be expanded to other applications, such as robotics, avionics, and life science.

Opportunities for Students

With this research, Dr. Kamalasadan would like to present unique opportunities to student researchers, especially from under-represented and minority groups, and foster interdisciplinary research collaborations with academic and other scientific laboratories. For this project, he plans to include undergraduate students and graduate student researchers from engineering, technology, and computer science who are interested in the program. He also plans to develop new courses and educational software and establish a scientific laboratory focusing on adaptive and intelligent systems and control. "His success is indicative more broadly of the importance UWF faculty place on the integration of teaching and research," said Richard Podemski, associate vice president for Research. "Awards such as these create exciting opportunities for faculty and students alike to remain on the cutting edge of new developments in their field."

For more information, contact Dr. Kamalasadan by phone (850-857-6451) or e-mail (skamalasadan@uwf.edu).