CNS Faculty Members Among UMass NSF CAREER Award Recipients
Content
Over the course of the 2024-25 academic year, five faculty members across the UMass Amherst campus were named the recipients of five-year U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER awards.
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a foundation-wide activity that offers NSF awards in support of early career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Two College of Natural Sciences (CNS) faculty members were among those awarded.
CNS Recipients
Brian Cheng (Environmental Conservation) has been awarded $738,152 to help understand how marine life will respond to changing environmental conditions. This is critical for ocean management and the wellbeing of the people who rely upon fisheries and marine resources. A key problem in this area is understanding how environmental change affects the way that species obtain food. Rising ocean temperatures may increase the food requirements of predatory animals, which can cause prey populations to decline. Alternatively, warming can cause multiple predators to compete and interfere with each other, reducing effects on prey.
“The basic angle of my research,” says Cheng, “is that understanding how climate change affects species is hindered by the fact that species’ interactions (predation, competition, mutualisms, parasitism, etc.) are important but hard to study. Ecologists have long known that these interactions can ‘rewire’ food webs and cause effects that permeate throughout the ecosystem, but we don’t know exactly how.”
Cheng’s CAREER project addresses this problem by focusing on abundant native and invasive predatory crabs and their consumption of blue mussels in the Gulf of Maine, which is among the fastest warming habitats on the planet. This project measures how temperature affects the physiology of the focal species and how they interact with each other using a series of laboratory experiments, then uses mathematical models to calculate the impacts of temperature on the relative abundance of predators and prey.
There’s an educational component, too, which Cheng says he’s “very excited about.” This includes the formation of two working groups that pair early career scientists with middle and late career mentors to train on team-based approaches to science.
For researchers such as Yuan Li (Astronomy), the past few decades have yielded tremendous advances in our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution, using both observations and detailed computer simulations. However, many key questions are still not fully understood. For example, most massive elliptical galaxies, among the oldest and most massive structures in the universe and hosts of supermassive black holes (SMBH), cease forming stars and transition into passively evolving systems. While the precise mechanisms underpinning such “quenching” are unclear, SMBHs appear to play a key role by suppressing the infall of fresh gas—the raw material of star formation—from the circumgalactic medium (CGM).
Li was awarded $601,796 to conduct a computer simulation of a massive galaxy's formation and evolution with spatial resolution sufficient to resolve the CGM's complex structure and the small-scale physical processes occurring there.
“One of the puzzles in astrophysics is that roughly half of today’s massive galaxies are ‘dead,’” says Li. “They have mysteriously ceased forming stars. Growing evidence suggests that their central supermassive black holes play a role. This project aims to study how supermassive black holes grow and how they shape the evolution of their host galaxies over cosmic history.”
This work will inform and complement large-scale cosmological simulations and will provide mentoring and training for three graduate students in cutting-edge galaxy simulations. Undergraduate students will also be involved, and the investigator will engage in outreach to local high schools and public planetarium shows.
Other UMass Recipients
Meghan Huber (Mechanical and Industrial Engineering) has been awarded $650,866 to study how people learn to walk using wearable robotic exoskeletons, ultimately as a means of improving mobility in aging populations or those with neurological injury. “There’s been this explosion of exoskeleton technology because we have better actuators now, and our batteries are lighter. But now the big question is: How do you make them effective and useful for humans?’ This higher question of ‘how do humans learn to cooperate and work with physical systems that have artificial intelligence’—it’s something that we don’t know.”
Ravi Karkar (Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences) was awarded $659,861 to spend the next five years improving our understanding of how to answer questions about one’s own health and wellbeing using self-tracked data, known as self-experimentation, and to provide better designs of technology to support the practice.
Yair Zick (Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences) was awarded $600,000 to develop algorithms and theoretical analysis for large-scale resource allocation, which involves distributing resources among various users, applications, or tasks. This process is essential in many contexts, including scheduling work shifts, providing aid during disasters, assigning courses to students, matching research papers with reviewers, and many other scenarios requiring distribution of goods, resources, or services. A key example is optimizing worker shift assignments to maximize efficiency while ensuring a balanced distribution of workloads among staff.
This story was originally published by the UMass News Office.