Dr. Jason JueRICHARDSON, Texas (Sept. 12, 2002) – Dr. Jason P. Jue, assistant professor of computer science at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Career Award – the organization’s most prestigious honor for junior faculty members. With the award comes a $320,000, five-year grant to fund Jue’s research in optical networks.

“The rapid growth of the Internet as a medium for global multimedia communications has resulted in a need for scalable network infrastructures that are capable of providing large amounts of bandwidth and supporting a diverse range of applications,” said Jue. “Thanks to this generous grant from the NSF, we will be able to examine the feasibility of developing photonic packet-switched networks, which have the potential to fulfill the diverse requirements of emerging broadband applications.”

In today’s optical networks, voice, video, and data traffic is typically transmitted via light over fiber cables, while electronics are used for processing, monitoring, and switching functions. Jue is working to help design an all-optical network in which packets of information are individually switched from source to destination optically. If developed and deployed, photonic packet-switched networks – freed from the bottleneck of electronic switching – could, in theory, provide significant increases in both network efficiency and throughput.

Jue’s research is being conducted at the Center for Advanced Telecommunications Systems and Services (CATSS) in UTD’s Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, where he is also involved in other optical network-related research, including work on control and management issues in optical networks, which is being funded by Alcatel. Jue joined UTD’s faculty in 1999 after earning his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis.

NSF is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. NSF established the career award program in 1995 to help top-performing scientists and engineers early in their careers to develop simultaneously their contributions and commitment to research and education.

About UTD

The University of Texas at Dallas, located at the convergence of Richardson, Plano and Dallas in the heart of the complex of major multinational technology corporations known as the Telecom Corridor , enrolls more than 7,000 undergraduate and 5,000 graduate students. The school’s freshman class traditionally stands at the forefront of Texas state universities in terms of average SAT scores. The university offers a broad assortment of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs. For additional information about UTD, please visit the university’s Web site at www.utdallas.edu.