Caltech Wins Three MURI Awards for 2006

PASADENA, Calif.—The California Institute of Technology has been awarded three of the 30 program awards from the federal Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Program. The awards will bring in $3 million in funding each year for the next five years.

MURI is a multiagency program overseen by the Department of Defense comprising three awarding offices: the Army Research Office (ARO), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The purpose of the program is to support multidisciplinary research projects at U.S. universities that have potential both for defense and for commercial applications.

The three programs at Caltech that have won funding are for studying the loading of marine structures, recognition during visual surveillance, and embedded control systems.

The principal investigators for the three programs, respectively, are Guruswami Ravichandran, who is the Goode Jr. Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering at Caltech, for "mechanics and mechanisms of impulse loading"; Pietro Perona, a professor of electrical engineering, for "learning to recognize for visual surveillance"; and Richard Murray, a professor of control and dynamical systems, for "specification, design, and verification of distributed embedded systems."

Accurding to the Department of Defense, the awards are "for research, graduate students, and laboratory instrumentation development that supports specific science and engineering research themes vital to national defense."

The 30 winners for this year's MURI projects were chosen in a rigorous competition from 143 proposals.