UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Five faculty members in Penn State’s College of Engineering were recognized with National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards. Each project ranges in duration from three and a half to five years, funded by grants worth roughly $500,000.
The CAREER Award is the most prestigious recognition the foundation offers in support of early-career faculty, according to the NSF website. In addition to funding a research project, the award also recognizes the faculty’s potential to serve as an academic role model in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
“The CAREER Award not only recognizes the importance of a research project, but also the potential of the early career faculty member to lead in the area of study,” said Anthony Atchley, acting dean of the College of Engineering, who noted that engineering faculty have received a more than 30 NSF CAREER Awards in the last four years. “Each awardee has the determination and motivation to pursue a significant research question. They will make an impact in their disciplines by answering critical questions, while equipping the next generation of engineers to carve out their own professional paths.”
The following individuals were named NSF CAREER Award recipients between March 1, 2022, and Feb. 28, 2023:
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Christopher Dancy, Harold and Inge Marcus Industrial and Manufacturing Career Development Associate Professor of Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering and of Computer Science & Engineering, for “SocioCulturally competent agents to study and improve human-AI interaction”
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Aida Ebrahimi, Thomas and Sheila Roell Early Career Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, of Biomedical Engineering and of Materials Science and Engineering, for “Tunable graphene microdevices for multiplexed detection of biomolecules beyond diffusion limit”
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Syed Rafiul Hussain, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, for “Principled approaches to securing next-generation cellular networks”
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Sri-Rajasekhar “Raj” Kothapalli, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, for “Smart and scalable approaches for developing multimodal optical and acoustic imaging technologies”
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Linxiao Zhu, John J. and Jean M. Brennan Clean Energy Early Career Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, for “Probing and understanding nonreciprocal and topological radiative heat transport in many-body magnetized systems”