Nine University of Notre Dame faculty members received National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards in 2020. Since 2014, Notre Dame faculty have earned 49 of these nationally competitive awards.

“The University is very pleased that so many of our newly hired faculty have earned these prestigious early career awards,” said Robert J. Bernhard, vice president for research and professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at Notre Dame. “This success reflects both the talent our departments, schools and colleges are able to recruit, as well as the research resources they have available to support their creative ideas.” 

The CAREER award recipients, who come from the Colleges of Arts and Letters, Engineering and Science, as well as the Keough School of Global Affairs, are as follows:

• Alexander Dowling, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, received the award for “Uncertainty quantification and optimization with hybrid models for molecular-to-systems engineering.”
• Erin Metz McDonnell, associate professor of in the Department of Sociology and concurrent assistant professor of Africana studies and in the Keough School, received the award for “Pockets of effectiveness and the diffusion of organizational capacity.”
• Eric Riedl, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, received the award for “Hyperbolicity properties of hypersurfaces.”
• Nathan Rose, the William P. and Hazel B. White Assistant Professor of Psychology and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging Lab, received the award for “Targeted memory reactivation with transcranial magnetic stimulation.”
• Walter Scheirer, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, received the award for “Learning at the edge: An extreme value theory for visual recognition.”
• Daniele Schiavazzi, the Huisking Foundation, Inc. Assistant Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, received the award for “Bayesian inference networks for model ensembles.”
• Matthew Webber, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, received the award for “Dissipative non-equilibrium supramolecular hydrogels using fuels.”
• Patrick Wensing, assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, received the award for “Task-level coordination of motor and machine for fluent lower-limb prostheses.”
• Sangpil Yoon, assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, received the award for “The next generation intracellular delivery device for immunotherapy: The integration between ultrasonic transducer and microfluidic chip.”

Additionally, Edward Kinzel, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, received his award while at Missouri University of Science and Technology for “Large-scale manufacturing of metasurfaces using microsphere photolithography." Kinzel joined the University in 2019.

The CAREER award program, established by the NSF in 1995, recognizes and supports outstanding early career faculty who exhibit a commitment to stimulating research while also providing educational opportunities for students. To learn about the University’s previous CAREER awardees, visit https://research.nd.edu/our-services/funding-opportunities/faculty/early-career-programs/nsf---career-award/.

Contact: Brandi R. Wampler, brandiwampler@nd.edu, 574.631.8183

Originally published by Brandi Klingerman at research.nd.edu on August 06, 2020.