Four researchers at UC San Diego and Scripps Institution of Oceanography have been chosen from among 735 applicants for Defense Department research instrumentation awards, which average $268,000 each, the Pentagon announced Wednesday.
Some 149 university researchers at 84 institutions were selected.
The Defense University Research Instrumentation Program, the Pentagon says, “supports the purchase of state-of-the-art equipment that augments current university capabilities or develops new capabilities to perform cutting-edge defense research and associated graduate student research training.”
UCSD winners, chosen by the Office of Naval Research, were:
- William Hodgkiss, an electrical engineer, whose award will pay a two-dimensional array for acoustic field structure research. He is on the staff of the Marine Physical Laboratory at Scripps.
- Andrew Lucas, a Scripps researcher whose award was for real-time data telemetry onboard the wirewalker wave-powered profiling vehicle.
- Robert Pinkel, a professor of oceanography, whose award was for improving performance of a hydrographic Doppler sonar system.
- And Caglar Yardim, an electrical engineer and assistant project scientist, whose award was for lower atmosphere electromagnetic propagation measurement.
The Defense Department says awards totaled $39.9 million, ranging from $40,000 to $1.1 million.
“The Defense University Research Instrumentation Program is highly competitive,” the Pentagon said. “The military service research offices solicited proposals from university investigators conducting science and engineering research of importance to DOD. This includes research that underpins advances in materials and quantum science; computing and networks; electronics and electro-optics; neuroscience; fluid dynamics; robotics and autonomous systems; and ocean, environmental, and biological science and engineering.”
