2024-2025 Early Career Award Recipients

Ruobing Bai

Assistant Professor
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
NSF CAREER Award, Interfacial Fracture, Fatigue, and Switchable Adhesion of Soft Sticky Adhesives to improve the functionality of soft sticky adhesive materials so that they do not easily crack or break, and can rapidly switch between adhesive and non-adhesive states.

Ambika Bajpayee

Associate Professor
Bioengineering
PECASE, White House for pioneering bioelectriceuticals to improve drug delivery to hard-to-treat connective tissues, like cartilage.

Eno Ebong

Associate Professor
jointly appointed in Chemical Engineering & Bioengineering
PECASE, White House for pioneering research that expands our understanding of vascular mechanobiology and reveals how biomechanical forces from tissue and flow influence blood vessel cell behavior, vascular health, and disease susceptibility.

Kristina Johnson

Assistant Professor
jointly appointed in Electrical and Computer Engineering & Communication Sciences and Disorders
NIH Career Development Award, Using Mobile Technology and Real-World Vocalization Samples to Generate Quantitative Metrics of Vocal Communication for Minimally-Speaking Individuals to generate a sensitive, quantitative metric of vocal communication for minimally-speaking individuals using a novel remote and highly personalized data collection methodology.

Kayse Lee Maass

Associate Professor
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
NSF CAREER Award, Multi-Agent Network Interdiction and Service Provision Models to Counter Human Trafficking to more effectively disrupt human trafficking and improve access to critical support for survivors.

Aravind Nagulu

Assistant Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering
NSF CAREER Award, Cryogenic-CMOS and Superconducting Circuits for Scalable Quantum Systems developing compact components for quantum computers that would reduce their size to semiconductor scale, enabling less expensive and more scalable computers.

Francesco Restuccia

Assistant Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering
DARPA Young Faculty Award, RADAR: Resource-Aware Dynamic Adaptation for Resilient DNNs in Low-SWaP Tactical Systems to protect AI-based neural networks within autonomous mobile systems against perturbations through real-time fine-grained reconfiguration.

Shahin Shahrampour

Assistant Professor
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
NSF CAREER Award, Foundations of Scalable, Fast, and Online Decentralized Manifold Optimization in Multi-Agent Networks working towards the development and adoption of decentralized manifold optimization in large-scale, multi-agent optimization.

Aatmesh Shrivastava

Associate Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering
DARPA Director’s Fellowship Award for developing low power, analog-based machine learning hardware that will result in sophisticated vision applications.

Tao Sun

Assistant Professor
Bioengineering
NIH NIGMS Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA), Probing Inflammation Dynamics via Multi-Modal Tracking and Control of Engineered Macrophages to develop ultrasound-controllable, multimodal imaging cellular probes and complementary ultrasound imaging technologies, enabling real-time tracking and modulation of inflammation dynamics and advancing precision medicine across diseases.

Xiaoyu Tang

Assistant Professor
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
NSF CAREER Award, Unraveling Flow-Fluid Coupling During Impact of Complex Fluid Droplets to understand and control the impact dynamics of particle-laden droplet on surfaces, for optimizing strategies to enhance precision and performance in industrial applications such as advanced manufacturing and coating processes.

Lei Wang

Assistant Professor
jointly appointed in Bioengineering & Biology
NIH Trailblazer Award, Programmable RNA-Based Sensors for In Situ Cell Type Detection and Response to create more precise, targeted therapies that can accurately identify and treat diseased cells while leaving healthy cells unharmed.

Benjamin Woolston

Assistant Professor
Chemical Engineering
ONR Young Investigator Award, Expanding the Product Range of Anaerobic Methanol Fermentation to engineering Clostridia to produce a wide range of chemicals, fuels, and materials relevant to the Navy from sustainable resources.

NSF CAREER Award, Metabolic ‘Doping’ To Enhance Production of Biochemicals From Sustainable C1 Feedstocks to understand the regulation of carbon metabolism and use the insight to make acetogens more effective for renewable production of fuels and chemicals.

Wei Xie

Associate Professor
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
NSF CAREER Award, Mechanism-Informed AI for Biological Systems-of-Systems to Accelerate Biomanufacturing Systems Integration and Innovations to develop fundamental artificial intelligence for biomanufacturing, accelerating automation, and system integration in complex biopharmaceutical manufacturing with improved capabilities and flexibility.

Qing Zhao

Assistant Professor
Chemical Engineering
NSF CAREER Award, Computational Characterization of Reaction Mechanisms and Catalytic Microenvironments in Redox-Mediated Ammonia Electrosynthesis to investigate fundamental chemistry in an electrochemical-based ammonia production process to create a more efficient and environmentally friendly process.