UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Nine faculty members in Penn State’s College of Engineering were recognized with National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards. Each project funded ranges in duration from three and a half to five years, with grants from roughly $500,000 to more than $800,000.

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.

“We hire the best and the brightest in the Penn State College of Engineering, as evidenced by the number of recent NSF CAREER award recipients on our faculty,” said Justin Schwartz, Harold and Inge Marcus Dean in the College of Engineering, who noted that engineering faculty have received a total of 30 NSF CAREER awards in the last three years. “Each awardee is ambitious and focused, with the passion and the motivation to make an impact as researchers, as mentors and in the discipline of engineering. They are not only answering big research questions, but they are also training and empowering the next generation of engineers to do the same.” 

To date*, the 2022 Penn State College of Engineering NSF CAREER award recipients are: 

• Chris Arges, associate professor of chemical engineering, for “Electrochemical pumping with high-temperature ionomers for challenging gas separations” 

• Antonio Blanca Pimentel, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, for “Sampling, learning and testing spin systems” 

• Margaret Byron, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, for “Liminal locomotion: Life at the air-water-land interface” 

• Jing Du, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, for “Structures and Properties of Bone at Multiple Length Scales”  

• Christian Pester, Thomas K. Hepler Early Career Professor in Chemical Engineering, for “Photocatalytic optical fibers” 

• Matthew Rau, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, for “The impact of extracellular polymeric substances on particle transport in aquatic environments” 

• Mingfu Shao, Charles K. Etner Early Career Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, for “Algorithms and tools for allele-specific transcript assembly”  

• Spencer Szczesny, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and of orthopaedics and rehabilitation, for “Studying tendon cell mechanobiology in the native tissue environment” 

• Yang Yang, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics, for “Characterization and understanding of point defect evolution during corrosion-induced grain boundary migration” 

The following individuals in the Penn State College of Engineering received NSF CAREER awards in 2021: 

• Saptarshi Das, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics, for “Two-dimensional straintronic field effect transistor” 

• Mahanth Gowda, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering, for “Sign-to-speech: An edge-IoT platform and software library for real time sign language recognition” 

• Weihua Guan, assistant professor of electrical engineering, for “Amplification-coupled solid-state nanopore digital counting: A versatile platform for point-of-care nucleic acid testing” 

• Bin Li, associate professor of electrical engineering, for “Wireless collaborative mixed reality networking: Foundations and algorithms for joint communication, computation and learning”  

• Nicholas Meisel, assistant professor of engineering design, for “Consideration of manufacturability in early state design for additive manufacturing”  

• Xingjie Ni, assistant professor of electrical engineering, for “Photonic integrated guided-wave-driven metasurfaces” 

• Eunhye Song, Harold and Inge Marcus Early Career Assistant Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, for “Advancing theory and practice of robust simulation analysis under input model risk” 

• Alan Wagner, Hartz Family Career Development Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Penn State, for “No time to explain: Developing robots that actively prevent overtrust during emergencies” 

The following individuals in the Penn State College of Engineering received NSF CAREER awards in 2020: 

• Caitlin Grady, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute, for “Ethical implications of connected critical infrastructure in the food-energy-water nexus” 

• Ryan Harne**, James F. Will Career Development Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, for “Adaptive origami structures for acoustic wave guiding” 

• Michael Hillman, L. Robert and Mary L. Kimball Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, for “A hybrid local-nonlocal peridynamics framework to model failure across deformations and strain rates 

• Shengxi Huang, assistant professor of electrical engineering and biomedical engineering, for “Multiplexed and selective molecular sensing based on Raman enhancement through 2D materials” 

• Mehdi Kiani, the Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, for “All-acoustic image-guided implantable microscopic ultrasound neuromodulation” 

• Xiaojun “Lance” Lian, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, for “Enhancing stem cell differentiation with CRISPR activators via non-integrating methods” 

• Guha Manogharan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, for “An integrated research plan to advance metal casting science and reinvigorate foundry workforce” 

• Anne Martin, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, for “Modeling human gait to optimize exoskeleton control and understand how the goal changes across walking tasks” 

• Donghyun Rim, assistant professor of architectural engineering, for “An integrated research and education framework for healthy buildings: Development and validation of a comprehensive indoor aerosol dynamic” 

• Julianna Simon, assistant professor of acoustics and biomedical engineering, for “Evaluating the distribution of bubble nuclei for acoustic cavitation in tissues” 

• Julian Wang**, associate professor of architectural engineering, for “Understanding the thermal and optical behaviors of the near-infrared-selective dynamic glazing structure” 

• Nathaniel Warner, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, for “Novel water quality monitors and indicators of salinization to define SALTSCAPES” 

• Danfeng Zhang, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, for “Building secure applications with non-static information flow policies”  

*Additional awards may be made later this year.  

**These recipients earned NSF CAREER awards prior to joining Penn State. The awards transferred to the University.