Grad student wins Kennedy Fellowship

By Michelle Jin     10/9/08 7:00pm

Arta Sadrzadeh, a mechanical engineering and material science graduate student, has won the Ken Kennedy-Cray Inc. Graduate Fellowship Award for 2008. Sadrzadeh will receive $5,000 for personal use. Given to graduate students who have a history in high performance computing, the award is named after the late Ken Kennedy, a professor and founder of the computer science program at Rice. The global supercomputer corporation Cray Inc., of which Kennedy was a board member, gave $150,000 in his honor to establish the Ken Kennedy-Cray Inc. Graduate Fellowship Fund in 2007.

Sadrzadeh is the second student to earn this award. He said he plans to use the money to pay his debts. Sadrzadeh's advisor, Chemistry Professor Boris Yakobson, nominated him for the award last year.

As part of the application, Sadrzadeh submitted his curriculum vitae, which includes a list of his publications, a recommendation letter from Yakobson and a summary of the computational materials science research he completed in Yakobson's lab.

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Sadrzadeh said his research focuses on modeling and studying the structure of nanomolecules.

"What we're doing is basically modeling a simulation on nanoscale, which is one billionth of a meter, close to the size of an atom," Sadrzadeh said. "When you're doing things on that level, there's a lot involved with quantum chemistry. There's a lot of coding, programming involved."

Sadrzadeh was notified of his receipt of the award a month before the school year started. Jan Odegard, executive director of the Computer & Information Technology Institute at Rice, informed him via e-mail.

Sadrzadeh received his doctorate degree from Texas A&M University and spent a year and a half as a post-doc at the Harishchandra Research Institute in India before coming to Rice to do more post-graduate research.

Sardzadeh said he decided to apply to Rice when a friend from Texas A&M who was working at Rice told him about the opportunities Rice offered in nanotechnology research. Sadrzadeh said nanotechnology appealed to him because it could be applied to a variety of different fields, from hydrogen storage for fuel cells to biological and pharmaceutical uses.

"What I was doing before was pure science," Sadrzadeh said. "This [Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science] had nice balance of theoretical work plus some engineering application, so I thought it was good for me."

Sadrazdeh said he has enjoyed his time researching at Rice.

"This experience at Rice was very rewarding and fulfilling," Sadrzadeh said. "It is a very nice place for this type of work and very research-oriented. I look forward to working more in this direction.

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