July 6 – Thien Nguyen, assistant professor of computer and information science, has been awarded a grant from the Army Research Office for “Boosting and Extending Event Extraction using Interaction Structures from Texts.” The three-year project, funded at more than $350,000, will support Thien’s research in developing new techniques to process massive and multilingual texts for information extraction. The key technologies involve using deep learning in artificial intelligence to uncover inherent structures and patterns in documents to enable intelligent data mining.

June 29 – Shannon Boettcher, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, has been named a finalist for the 2021 Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry. Three awards are given in the areas of life sciences, chemistry, and physical sciences and engineering to promising young scientists by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and New York Academy of Sciences. Boettcher’s research has advanced technology that turns simple mixtures of water and atmospheric gases into hydrogen fuel, plastics, chemicals and fertilizer. The winners will be announced on July 20.

Each term Around the O Workplace will recognize awards, honors and other professional recognition of University of Oregon faculty, staff, and graduate employees. Submissions should be brief and include a link to the award website.