Five Columbia Engineering professors have won a National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards this year. Their work carries unusual transformative potential: Agostino Capponi is formulating a horizon to boost a resilience of tellurian financial markets and other formidable network systems, Dan Esposito is building electocatalytic materials to propel a destiny of abounding solar fuels, Karen Kasza’s investigate on hankie mechanics could irradiate their purpose in birth defects and lead to a invention of new biologically desirous materials, Ioannis Kougioumtzoglou is devising a some-more strong and fit displaying technique that can comparison a stipulations of stream stochastic engineering dynamical systems, and James Teherani is operative on a category of transistors to expostulate ultra-low-energy electronics. The grants, any totaling $500,000 over 5 years, are among a many rival given by a NSF.
“We are so gratified for a professors, whose forefront investigate promises to move innovations that will advantage humanity,” says Mary Boyce, Dean of Columbia Engineering. “They join a flourishing cadre of NSF CAREER endowment winners on a faculty, whose investigate is addressing a far-reaching operation of hurdles from sustainability to connectivity.”
Agostino Capponi, partner highbrow in industrial engineering and operations research and a member of a Data Science Institute, is devising a vital decision-making horizon to residence risk in formidable network systems, where a opening of one member can have destabilizing effects on a whole system—as with a 2008 financial crisis. His investigate will mangle new belligerent in providing a elemental bargain of incentives that conduct network vulnerabilities, lessen systemic risk, and solve failures when institutions can't transparently observe a whole network structure.
Drawing on these insights, supervising authorities can conform policies able of accounting for reactions among financial institutions responding to shocks and failures. (Read more about Capponi’s investigate project.)
Daniel Esposito, partner highbrow of chemical engineering, leads a research group that develops solar, catalytic, and electrochemical appetite acclimatisation technologies that modify abounding and renewable solar appetite into storable “solar fuels” such as hydrogen. For his CAREER award, Esposito and his lab will rise new electocatalytic materials that could significantly urge a potency and selectivity of formidable electrochemical reactions. Esposito is generally focused in exploring how electrochemical reactions start during a buried interface between a overlayer and steel catalyst, with hopes of exploiting any singular opportunities to control chemical greeting pathways detected there. (Read more about Esposito’s investigate project.)
Karen Kasza, an partner highbrow of mechanical engineering, draws on engineering, biology, and production to know and control how cells self-organize into organic tissues with accurate automatic and constructional properties. Kasza’s work on light-gated strategy of mobile force era and mechanics expands a bargain of rudimentary development, potentially educational how these army minister to birth defects. Ultimately, she seeks collection and approaches that could capacitate a building of multicellular tissues and new biologically desirous materials. (Read more about Kasza’s investigate project.)
With his NSF support, Ioannis Kougioumtzoglou, partner highbrow of civil engineering and engineering mechanics, hopes to emanate a model change in a approach complicated engineering systems and structures are analyzed and designed underneath a participation of uncertainties. Modeling techniques need absolute mathematical collection that can comment not usually for formidable response behaviors though also for a participation of uncertainties in a process. Current state-of-the-art methods of investigate are possibly rarely accurate or computationally efficient, though not both. Kougioumtzoglou is posterior elemental investigate to adapt, extend, and request path-integral-based mathematical collection and techniques from fanciful production to establish a response and consider a trustworthiness of stochastic engineering dynamical systems. If successful, his technique could have a vital impact on a series of rising technologies, including nano-mechanics and appetite harvesting. (Read some-more about Kougioumtzoglou.)
James Teherani, partner highbrow of electrical engineering and a member of the Data Science Institute, is operative to experimentally denote a new form of field-effect transistor able of overcoming a appetite stipulations fundamental to required devices, and thereby potentially enabling ultra-low-energy electronics. These transistors, famous as ultra-low-energy Auger FETs, would commission a operation of new applications—from long-lasting “micro-dust” sensors and implantable bioelectronics to dungeon phones that final a month on a singular charge—driving a new call of technological innovation. In environment a foundational production for this innovative device concept, Teherani also hopes to enlarge a bargain of Auger era and recombination processes in quantum structures, that is vicious for improving potency in LEDs, lasers, and photodetectors. (Read more about Teherani’s investigate project.)
Since 2015, 17 Columbia Engineering expertise members have been respected with a NSF CAREER award.
