Three junior Vanderbilt faculty members have won highly competitive
national grants designed to recognize and promote promising
researchers. The grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S.
Army and the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Physics will
support research ranging from the origin of stars to better equipment
for combat personnel and first responders.
The winners are Keivan Stassun, assistant professor of astronomy; Julia
Velkovska, assistant professor of physics; and Mark Stremler, assistant
professor of mechanical engineering.
"Needless to say, we’re thrilled with the news," Associate Provost for
Research and Graduate Education Dennis Hall said. "The competition for
research-initiation grants from the various federal agencies is
ferocious, so it reflects well both on Professors Stassun, Velkovska
and Stremler and on Vanderbilt that they were able to compete so
effectively. We salute them for their accomplishments."
Stassun won the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award, the
agency’s most prestigious award for new faculty. A total of $800,000
over five years, it is the largest NSF CAREER award in Vanderbilt
history and the largest ever awarded to an astronomer.
Stassun’s award will fund two distinct efforts: gathering and analyzing
data to develop more accurate theories about star formation and
increasing minority representation in the physical sciences.
The research side of Stassun’s program involves the use of a group of
telescopes in ChilÈ, which Vanderbilt manages with a consortium of
other universities, as well as use of the University’s Advanced
Computing Center for Research and Education.
"It turns out that right now our basic theoretical models for
predicting how a star of a particular size will evolve early in its
life and how long it will take for very basic physical processes to
occur can be off by a factor of 10," he said. "It’s a question that’s
salient for understanding our origins because we still don’t know how
and when planets form around young stars."
The education component of Stassun’s CAREER program is built upon Vanderbilt’s close partnership with Fisk University.
"The No.1 university in the nation producing minority undergraduates
who go on to get their Ph.D.s in the physical sciences is Fisk," he
said. "It’s amazing considering they are working with just 1,000
undergraduates, and they’re beating schools like those in the Big Ten
that have tens of thousands of undergraduates."
Stassun hopes to encourage more minority undergraduates to pursue their
Ph.D.s in the physical sciences by continuing to build the relationship
between Fisk’s talent and Vanderbilt’s resources through a variety of
mentoring and training experiences.
The second award winner, Velkovska, is one of only three scientists who
received an Outstanding Junior Investigator (OJI) award from the U.S.
Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Physics this year.
Velkovska is a member of an international team of scientists working at
the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National
Laboratory, a special atom smasher that is designed to recreate the
quark gluon plasma, a primordial matter/energy soup that physicists
think existed early in the life of the universe.
The $180,000, three-year award will allow Velkovska to follow up on a
surprising discovery she made when RHIC began creating micro-explosions
with temperatures and pressures considered high enough to create this
exotic form of matter. She noticed that in the most violent collisions,
the number of the highly energetic proton/antiproton pairs being
created was 300 percent higher than predicted.
"For an experimentalist, it is very exciting to make the discovery that
you set out to find," Velkovska said. "But it’s even more exciting to
find something that was not predicted."
Velkovska realized that more information was needed to find the cause
of the unexpected spike in the production of these particles. However,
the 3,000-ton PHENIX detector that she and her colleagues were using
did not have the capability to obtain the required data. Velkovska
conceived of improvements that could be made in one of PHENIX’s systems
that would gather the needed information. She made this the centerpiece
of her successful OJI proposal.
While waiting for the decision on her proposal, Velkovska made and
tested a prototype of the new detector system at the Japanese KEK
Laboratory. With the results from the test, she has made an improved
version that will be installed in November. A full $500,000 upgrade
will be partially funded by Velkovska’s OJI award.
Combat personnel and emergency first responders will be the ultimate
beneficiaries of the research of the third award-winning young
investigator, Mark Stremler. He won the highly competitive Army
Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator Program award.
Stremler is developing ways to mix fluids efficiently within very small
devices, such as "lab-on-a-chip" bio-chemical sensors for
counter-terrorism and wearable heat exchangers that will enable combat
and emergency personnel to withstand extreme temperature conditions.
The ARO award will enable Stremler and his associates to understand the
behavior of fluids flowing in microfluidic systems, which have channels
with diameters significantly smaller than one millimeter. The award
provides $149,995 in support for 3 years of research.
Because these fluidic systems are so small, little is known about how
they will perform in the high-tech devices that the Army hopes to
develop. "We are focusing on a fluid phenomenon called chaotic
advection," Stremler said. "Our research will guide the design of
microfluidic systems that work reliably and efficiently."
Fluid mixing plays a central role in many important microfluidic
applications, including bio-chemical sensors and heat exchangers.
Unfortunately, as device sizes shrink, it becomes increasingly
difficult to mix fluids efficiently. Producing chaotic particle motion
with chaotic advection is an effective way to enhance mixing in these
small systems.
"We are studying ways in which microscale device configuration and
operation can be used to generate chaotic advection and optimal
mixing," Stremler said. "Devices that are ‘designed for chaos’
will enable significant technological advances in systems of interest
in both the military and commercial sectors."
Media contacts: Melanie Catania, (615) 322-NEWS
melanie.moran@vanderbilt.edu
David Salisbury, (615) 343-6803
david.salisbury@vanderbilt.edu