CNS Faculty Members Among Recipients of 2023-24 NSF Career Awards

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Over the course of the 2023-24 academic year, eight 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.

The College of Natural Science has been awarded two CAREER grants during this cycle, bringing its total to 63. This year’s recipients include Annie Raymond (mathematics and statistics) and Varghese Mathai (physics).

The College of Engineering was awarded four CAREER grants this year, bringing its total to 24 awards within the last five academic years. This year’s awardees include Emily Kumpel (civil and environmental engineering), Robert Niffenegger (electrical and computer engineering), Govindarajan Srimathveeravalli (mechanical and industrial engineering), and Jinglei Ping (mechanical and industrial engineering).

Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) professors Hui Guan and Negin Rahimi were awarded CAREER grants for their work on long-range wireless sensing and the development of search engines that work on a conversational model, respectively. The awards for Guan and Rahimi bring the cumulative number of CAREER awards for CICS to 38.

The CNS Recipients

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Annie Raymond of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Annie Raymond (mathematics and statistics) has been awarded $450,000 to further the understanding of “graph profiles” – objects that record all possible relationships between local patterns. Many problems in engineering, science, economics, and social sciences involve complicated systems that can be represented as graphs.

“For example, the brain can be viewed as a graph where there are over 100 billion nodes corresponding to the neurons and where the connections represent synapses,” says Raymond.

Computing different properties of these graphs yields valuable information about the original problems, but it is difficult to do so because of the size of the graphs. One technique to study such large graphs is to understand them locally by determining how prevalent certain small substructures are, for example through homomorphism densities.

The research component of this project will focus on four objectives: to compute graph profiles, including some in more than two dimensions; to study the strengths and limitations of different techniques (e.g., (rational) sums of squares, sums of nonnegative circuits) in proving inequalities over graph profiles; to better understand for which classes of inequalities certification over graph profiles is (un)decidable; and to build theory and compute tropicalizations of graph profiles, which are simpler and yet capture all valid pure binomial inequalities, and to use these computations to resolve problems in extremal graph theory.

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Varghese Mathai of the Department of Physics

Varghese Mathai (physics) has been awarded $554,191 to investigate fluid-structure interactions where the interacting structure is thin and ultra-soft (like Jell-O), and where the flow is turbulent. The complexity of this topic is increased by the fact that such thin elastic materials can undergo large, nonlinear, flow-induced shape morphings, and there is a knowledge gap in our understanding of the behavior of such ultra-soft solids in turbulent flows.

The principal aim of this project is to develop a deeper understanding of this special combination where nonlinear elasticity and (nonlinear) fluid dynamics are entangled, leading to the emergence of new flow properties. 

“Studying the fundamental mechanics of ultra-soft materials within turbulent flows can aid in the development of new technologies for energy extraction and propulsion,” says Mathai. “For example, these soft materials can be designed to shape-morph and adapt to varying tidal currents, improving the energy-extraction efficiency.”

The project will furthermore seek to develop and systematically explore flapping membrane hydrofoils in a water flume facility using a three-degree-of-freedom platform, study the implications of elastic shape-morphing on unsteady lift and flow-induced resonance phenomena, and understand the mechanisms by which the membrane oscillations can be tuned to control turbulence and modulate drag.

This approach is expected to yield fundamental insight into the mechanics of ultra-soft materials in turbulent flow environments and provide opportunities for future innovation in tidal and fluvial energy extraction. Furthermore, Mathai will look to develop a class of soft materials for use in flow control, drag modulation and energy extraction applications.

This story was originally published by the UMass News Office.