This month, Arts & Sciences researchers received awards from NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and others.
Sophia Hayes, vice dean of graduate education and professor of chemistry, and Kater Murch, professor of physics, won a five-year, $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to establish a convergent quantum sciences and engineering graduate training program, “Linking Quantum Sensing Technologies across Disciplines.” Erik Henriksen, associate professor of physics, and Sheretta Butler-Barnes, associate professor in the Brown School, will be working with Hayes and Murch as co-principal investigators on the project.
Erik Henriksen, associate professor of physics, received a three-year, $599,784 grant from the Office of Naval Research for his project titled “Pursuit of a Topological Qubit Based on Thermal Transport of Majorana Fermions in Kitaev Magnets.” Li Yang, professor of physics, will be working with Henriksen as a co-principal investigator on the project.
Claire Masteller, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences, won a $313,872 grant from the National Science Foundation for collaborative research on separating the climate and weather of river channels. Masteller’s work aims to aid researchers in determining which river systems are vulnerable to erosion due to changing climate and landscapes as well as provide a foundation for treating rivers dynamically within the next-generation of river flood hazard forecasting models.
Willem Dickhoff, professor of physics, was awarded $300,000 by the National Science Foundation for research on “Green's Functions and the Nuclear Many-Body Problem.”
Scott VanBommel, senior scientist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, won a $284,827 award from NASA to support research on enhancing the analytical capabilities and science return of the Mars Curiosity rover at Mount Sharp through the application of spectral deconvolution and modeling methods.
Alexander Seidel, associate professor of physics, and Zohar Nussinov, professor of physics, received a $224,287 award from the National Institutes of Health. The award supports their work on imaging goggles for fluorescence-guided surgery, conducted in collaboration with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Walid Ben Mansour, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, received a $191,601 grant from the National Science Foundation to determine the thermal and compositional structure of Antarctica using seismic, gravity, and topography data and petrological modeling. Ben Mansour’s co-investigator is Douglas A. Wiens, the Robert S. Brookings Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Read more from the Source.
Bridget Bey, a graduate student in archaeology, won a $20,000 grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for her project titled “Coming-of-Age in the Ancient Andes: A Bioarchaeological Evaluation of Early Life Course History, Puberty, and Gender in Late Pre-Hispanic Andean Culture.” The award supports Bey’s dissertation fieldwork under the supervision of Sarah Baitzel, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology.
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