Assistant professors Juliet Gopinath and Khurram Afridi have received 2016 CAREER Awards, the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for junior faculty.
"We anticipate with excitement that this new class of CAREER grantees will make pioneering discoveries and inspire young minds to advance the engineering enterprise and improve the lives of all Americans," NSF Assistant Director for Engineering Pramod Khargonekar said in a press release.
Gopinath will use her award to study the relationship between orbital angular momentum and rotating objects. “The results from the research will be far-reaching, with information about orbital angular momentum modal content essential for free-space communications and endoscopic super-resolution imaging (STED) for protein-level imaging in the human body,” she wrote in her proposal.
Afridi’s award will support his research in high-frequency power electronics for wireless power transfer systems. The technology “has the potential to address critical energy issues and improve human quality of life by enabling autonomous charging in applications ranging from electric vehicles (EVs) and robotics to portable electronics and biomedical implants,” Afridi wrote.
CAREER awards provide approximately $500,000 over five years.
