[PSUBS-MAILIST] Gliding subs

[MARCO <marco@zeeman.co.nz>]

Princeton prof gets 'genius' grant from foundation
She'll get $500,000 over 5 years for work in control theory.

By Steve Strunsky
Of The Associated Press

NEWARK | You could call Naomi Ehrich Leonard a control freak. You also could
call her a genius.

Leonard, 40, is a professor at Princeton University's mechanical and
aerospace engineering department, whose work for 10 years in the field of
control theory has won her a $500,000, five-year fellowship from the John D.
and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The MacArthur fellowships, including Leonard's and 22 others announced on
Monday, are commonly known as ''genius grants.''

''I work in a field called control theory, which has to do with
understanding and designing the means to modify the control of systems,''
Leonard said in a telephone interview on Monday. ''A mundane example would
be the cruise control in your car.''

But Leonard's work is hardly mundane. She has developed mechanisms to
control 5-foot-long unmanned submarines designed to ''glide'' undersea for
months at a time, collecting data on water temperature, salt concentrations
and other factors affecting undersea life.

The submersibles have no propellants, only pumps to take on or release water
for ballast which, combined with ''little wings'' and the ability to shift
their weight, allow them to pitch up or down and side to side, gliding
through the currents, and occasionally surfacing to take direction from a
satellite signal.

Leonard has been working on her project since 1999, under grants from the
National Science Foundation and the Defense Department's Office of Naval
Research. Her collaborators are marine biologists, engineers and other kinds
of scientists from Harvard, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in
Massachusetts, MIT and elsewhere.

Among their research, they have sought to learn how schools of fish
collectively forage for food and otherwise function as a group better than
they would individually.

''What we're sort of trying to do is make our fleet emulate that, so they
forage for information,'' but at distances of up to two miles apart, Leonard
said.

Leonard, who is originally from Marble Head, Mass., got her doctorate in
electrical engineering in 1994 from the University of Maryland, College
Park. She teaches one class at Princeton, a graduate course in geometric
mechanics.

The MacArthur money is paid in quarterly installments of $25,000 over the
five-year life of the fellowship. Leonard, who learned of her award on
Monday, has not decided how to spend it.

Copyright © 2004, The Morning Call
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