The Presidential Young Investigator Award (PYI) was awarded by the National Science Foundation of the United States Federal Government. The program operated from 1984 to 1991, and was replaced by the NSF Young Investigator (NYI) Awards and Presidential Faculty Fellows Program (PFF).
The award gave minimum of $25,000 a year for five years from NSF, with the possibility of up to $100,000 annually if the PYI obtained matching funds from industry. The program was criticized in 1990 as not being the best use of NSF funds in an era of tight budgets.
PYI award recipients include:
Alice Agogino, engineering, 1985
Paul Alivisatos, chemistry, 1991
Peter B. Armentrout, chemistry, 1984
David P. Anderson, computer science
Prithviraj Banerjee, computer systems architecture, 1987
Paul F. Barbara, chemistry, 1984
John Bartholdi, industrial and systems engineering, 1985
Mary Beckman, linguistics, 1988
Mladen Bestvina, mathematics, 1988
Rogers Brubaker, sociology, 1994
Stephen Z.D. Cheng, polymer science, 1991
Vish V. Subramaniam, mechanical engineering, 1991
Supriyo Datta, electrical engineering, 1984
Rina Dechter, computer science, 1991
Bruce Donald, computational biology, 1989
David L. Donoho, statistics, 1985
Lin Fanghua, mathematics, 1989
Juli Feigon, biochemistry, 1989
Eric Fossum, electrical engineering, 1986
Jennifer Freyd, psychology
Elaine Fuchs, cell biology
Gerald Fuller, chemical engineering
Huajian Gao, materials science
Leslie Greengard, advanced comp research program and computational mathematics, 1990
David Hillis, evolutionary biology, 1987
Laurie Simon Hodrick, economics, 1991
John M. Hollerbach, haptics and tactile perception, 1984
Kathleen Howell, astronomy, 1984
Paul Hudak, computer science, 1985
Moshe Kam, electrical engineering, 1990
David B. Kaplan, physics, 1990
Mehran Kardar, physics, 1989
Karen Kavanagh, physics, 1991
Vijay Kumar (roboticist), 1991
James W. LaBelle, physics, 1990
Kevin K. Lehmann, chemistry, 1985
Charles E. Leiserson, computer science, 1985
John H. Lienhard V, mechanical engineering
John Edwin Luecke, mathematics, 1992
Eric Mazur, physics
Mark McMenamin, geology, 1988
Fulvio Melia, astrophysics
Carolyn Meyers, chemical engineering
Michael I. Miller, biomedical engineering
Robert F. Murphy (computational biologist), 1983
Monica Olvera de la Cruz, Materials Physics, 1989
Randy Pausch, computer science
Ken Perlin, computer graphics, 1991
Ronald T. Raines, chemical biology
Lisa Randall, theoretical physicist, 1992
Ares J. Rosakis, 1985
Karl Rubin, mathematics
Sunil Saigal, civil engineering, 1990
Peter Salovey, psychology
Aziz Sancar, molecular biophysics, 1984
Robert Sapolsky, neuroendocrinology
Philip B. Stark, statistics, 1989
Michael Steer, electrical engineering, 1986
Howard A. Stone, chemical, bioengineering, environmental, and transport systems, 1989
Steven Strogatz, mathematics, 1990
Éva Tardos, algorithm analysis
Masaru Tomita, computational biology, 1988
Craig Tovey, operations research, 1986
Jeffrey Vitter, computer science, 1985
Martin Yarmush, biochemical engineering, 1988
Todd Yeates, biochemistry, 1991
Alex Zettl, physics, 1984
Steven Zimmerman, chemistry
The NSF Presidential Faculty Fellowship (PFF) program was launched by President George H.W. Bush to honor 30 young engineering and science professors. The awards were up to $100,000 per year for 5 years.
David Culler, Computer Science, 1992
Theodore (Ted) Rappaport, Wireless Communications, 1992
Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Electrical/Bioengineering, 1992
