Bahar's work draws NSF backing through grants for women and career development
There are a few unwritten rules for a successful academic career. Assistant Professor Ruth Iris Bahar seems to like breaking them - successfully.
Rule One: Choose an academic field commonly entered by your gender. Bahar joined Brown's Division of Engineering in January 1996 after earning her doctorate at the University of Colorado. A member of the electrical sciences group, she is one of three women on the engineering faculty of about 35.
Rule Two: Research funding is difficult to come by unless you have a proven record of success. Bahar received a $200,000 Early Career Development Grant from the National Science Foundation based on the research in her doctoral dissertation. She was one of about 300 young researchers to receive such an award last year. (Associate Professor Janet Blume, one of the other two women on the engineering faculty, received a similar NSF award in the early days of her career at Brown.)
Rule Three: Funding for a new research idea is difficult to find, almost impossible if you are new. Bahar has also received a $75,000 award from NSF's Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) to develop new design technologies for computer circuit structure.
The early career grants "are made to only the most promising young faculty members through a highly competitive process," says Rod Clifton, dean of the Division of Engineering. "Because these awards carry substantial multi-year funding, they can have major impact on the shaping of a career." In Professor Bahar's case the career grant "should provide a base of research support for developing tools to produce high-performance, power-conscious computing," he says.
"Lower power [as used by computers] was my thing in graduate school," Bahar explains. "This research is geared toward configuring computer architecture for lower energy consumption while maintaining speed and accuracy. A good example is the laptop computer working on a battery. If you could run your processor at the same performance levels with less power, you could run it a lot longer."
Her current investigations focus on cache configuration on computer chips. Applications are being tested on simulation platforms designed in Brown's computer engineering laboratory. She recently reported on one segment of her work at the IEEE Volta International Workshop on Low Power Design in Como, Italy.
Her second NSF award, from POWRE is "seed money geared specifically toward helping women who want to explore the feasibility of a new line of research or educational activity," she said. NSF created the program to further career advancement and the visibility of women in engineering and other scientific disciplines.
In this new line of inquiry, Bahar focuses on circuit-level implementations in computer structure rather than the higher-level architectural design. Today, circuit designers have two choices, she explains. They can spend months or years designing 70 to 90 percent of the circuit from scratch, or sacrifice some performance in their design and use CAD (computer-aided design) tools to synthesize a greater portion of the circuit.
Simply put, Bahar seeks to develop CAD techniques that use several different circuit implementations in the design of a single chip instead of just one as now is possible. This would enable the designer to mix different structures within the same circuit to obtain the desired area, power and performance constraints.
"Computer engineering is a rapidly changing field that rewards those with the agility to change directions quickly," Clifton notes. "Changing directions is never easy, especially when you carry the responsibilities that seem to go with being the only woman faculty member in your research group. This POWRE grant provides a timely and well-deserved award for Professor Bahar who has recognized the importance of redirecting her research on logic synthesis tools to transistor-level structures."
Currently, Bahar finds few ties between her research and that of other Brown faculty members, but she is looking for ways to collaborate, both in the division and in computer science, and to use her research in the electrical engineering curriculum.
"I think Brown offers a great environment. I like the size of the engineering department and the high faculty-student ratio. It lets the students get to know and work more closely with the faculty," she said.
Graduate students Yu Bai, Brian Fisk and Brad Simeral work with Bahar on her CAREER research; Mahesh Madhav '99 provides assistance on the chip design project.
Her awards also include funds to mentor female students, but because she teaches only upper-level classes, Bahar fears she may lack the visibility needed to meet the freshmen and sophomores who usually seek mentors. She also points out that there just is not a large pool of female engineering students to tap into.
This isn't the University's fault, Bahar adds. The number of women in the electrical engineering profession and in the engineering classroom has stagnated at between 10 and 15 percent for years. Women, however, have had time to move up the career path to hold more visible and prestigious engineering positions in industry and academia. This, she hopes, will encourage more female students to break some of those unwritten rules.