Professor Chandrajit Bajaj received a 2011-12 Moncrief Grand Challenge Faculty Award to pursue his project on  three-dimensional imaging at the molecular level of therapeutic drug targets. He was among seven University of Texas at Austin researchers selected for the award who are confronting what the scientific community has defined as this century's grand challenges in drug design, environmental sustainability and improved oil recovery. The awards range up to $60,000 for a semester.

The awards, funded by the private donations of oilman and philanthropist W. A. "Tex" Moncrief of Fort Worth and an anonymous donor, enable scientists and engineers to work at the Institute for Computational and Engineering Sciences (ICES) on challenges that affect the competitiveness and international standing of the United States.

Grand challenges are problems that must be addressed to achieve a sustainable, economically robust and politically stable future. These involve using computational methods to study such topics as cardiovascular engineering, water sustainability and weather. Other vitally important areas include carbon sequestration, drug design and delivery, advanced materials, rising seas modeling, national security, nano-science and engineering, and computational medicine and biomedicine.

Over the past three years the Moncrief Grand Challenge Awards Program has provided more than $1 million in funding for university faculty to pursue research in computational science and engineering.

For more information, contact: Becky Rische, Institute for Computational and Engineering Sciences (ICES), 512-232-5784, becky@ices.utexas.edu.