12 Win NSF Early Career Grants

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering

Herman’s goal is to advance fundamental understanding of the coupled and evolving stressors facing water resources systems, and to leverage this dynamic information to transform the process of adaptive planning amid uncertainty. This goal is to be achieved within the context of Northern California water resources, supported by sustained engagement with state and local water agencies.

Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering  

Kulkarni aims to help design better and cheaper catalysts for fuel cell applications. Existing catalysts are made with expensive platinum-based alloys, which are difficult to scale for mass production. His project will focus on metal organic frameworks that act like nanoreactors. He and his team will develop multiscale models, allowing the researchers  to narrow down the nearly endless possible designs to find those best suited for further experiments.

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering

Lin’s project aims to use machine learning to bring efficiency and lower cost to the process of giving old electric vehicle batteries new life in renewable energy. Many EV batteries, which are typically working at 80 percent capacity when “retired,” get “second lives” in lower-power systems that store solar and wind energy. But the batteries need to be evaluated before they are reused, and doing this manually is expensive and time consuming. Lin’s goal is to develop a machine learning framework that can check the health of any battery at any point quickly and accurately. If successful, the framework will help researchers develop second-life battery systems and accelerate the green energy revolution.

Department of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering

McCormack’s project will use a combination of computation and experiments to develop tools called phase diagrams for novel high-temperature ceramic materials. These advanced phase diagrams will be essential for materials engineers working to develop ultra-high temperature materials for applications in hypersonics, nuclear (fission and fusion) reactors and shielding for spacecraft, among other things.

Department of Environmental Toxicology, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

Nguyen is studying newly discovered pathways by which sulfur radicals can form in the environment and the potential importance of these reactions for influencing the composition of the atmosphere and understanding human-induced climate impacts. Sulfur radicals are known to be reactive oxidants that can form compounds such as organosulfates, which could affect atmospheric composition and cloud formation. Nguyen and her research group will study how the reactions of sulfur radicals with organic compounds may change under different conditions relevant to cloud-fog droplets and the liquid water of aerosol particles.

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering

Putnam’s award will support research that aims to boost infrared spectroscopy, a widespread technology with uses ranging from breath analysis for early disease detection to environmental monitoring for climate science. Putnam’s lab will leverage recent developments in ultrafast lasers and nonlinear optics to develop compact infrared spectrometers with vastly improved resolution and novel capabilities. These new devices will enable many new applications across scientific disciplines.

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering

Radulaski leads the Quantum Nanophotonics Lab, exploring the potential of quantum technologies in scientific research, computation and communications. Her CAREER project will explore optically active defects in semiconductors, called color centers. Integrating these color centers into nanophotonic devices could improve the performance of quantum hardware for applications in quantum communication, computation and simulation. 

Department of Plant Biology, College of Biological Sciences

Shabek’s project will use advanced methods from structural biology, biochemistry and plant biology to elucidate the sensing mechanism of strigolactones, an emerging and unique class of plant hormones that regulate many aspects of plant growth and development. The knowledge generated from this project may have far-reaching impacts in understanding the biology of plant hormone signaling pathways, in addition to advancing technologies in agriculture, including germination control of crops and parasitic weeds.

Department of Mathematics, College of Letters and Science

Starkston's research is in symplectic topology and low-dimensional topology. For example, she studies how four-dimensional spaces, or manifolds, can be represented in two or three dimensions. One approach to that, Starkston said, is to construct a series of two-dimensional pieces that fit together in a specific way to define a four-dimensional object, much as a floor, walls and roof can fit together to define a three-dimensional house. The four-dimensional spaces she studies are abstract, but could represent anything with four parameters — such as a three-dimensional object that changes over time. 

Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering

Thakur’s project tackles the problem of repairing mistakes in deep neural networks, or DNNs, a type of machine learning algorithm loosely modeled after the human brain, which aim to mimic human intelligence by learning from experience. They have been successfully applied to a wide variety of problems, including image recognition, natural-language processing, medical diagnosis and self-driving cars, but they are far from infallible and mistakes can have disastrous consequences. Thakur’s goal is to reduce or eliminate this danger by developing techniques and tools to repair a trained deep neural network once a mistake has been discovered.

Department of Chemistry, College of Letters and Science

Velázquez’s lab creates new materials for use in nanoelectronics, green energy and environmental remediation. His grant will support research on compounds called chalcogenides, which contain the elements sulfur, selenium or tellurium. Many chalcogenides are semiconductors, and can harness sunlight to create fuels from carbon dioxide or convert solar energy into electricity. Velázquez and his students will use computational modeling to help develop new chalcogenides for energy conversion uses. The team will collaborate with researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. 

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering

Soil liquefaction remains a leading cause of earthquake damage worldwide. Ziotopoulo’s project will investigate and formalize new approaches for learning from geotechnical data and inform the next generation of liquefaction evaluation tools. Increasing amounts of data from the field and from experiments, together with advances in algorithms and data storage create an opportunity to exploit data science in the earthquake engineering toolbox. Her CAREER award will integrate physics-based and data-driven methods to accelerate discoveries in geotechnical engineering and develop robust, validated tools that contribute to reducing earthquake damage and increasing societal resilience.