This spring, five members the Whiting School faculty received the National Science Foundation’s Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, which recognizes the excellence of early-career faculty members with the potential for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.
Daniel Khashabi, assistant professor, Computer Science
Proposal: “Reasoning-Centered AI for Scientific Discovery”
Khashabi studies the computational foundations of intelligent behavior within mediums of communication, particularlynatural language. With his award, he plans to develop AI systems capable of helping researchers uncover hidden connections across scientific literature—systems that can recognize structural parallels between ideas in different domains.
Yuting Luo
, assistant professor, Materials Science and Engineering
Proposal: “Uncovering Molecular Design Principles Linking Additive Chemistry to Zn Anode Structure and Interfacial Electrochemistry”
Luo’s research focuses on designing and characterizing multiscale materials and understanding the correlation of chemical, electrochemical, mechanical properties with functional performances for energy storage applications. Her award will fund an investigation into how additives influence zinc-battery performance.
Ruggero Rossi, assistant professor, Environmental Health and Engineering
Proposal: “Regulating the Nitrogen Cycle Via Bioelectrochemical Fertilizer Production and Informed Food Consumption”
Rossi studies sustainable energy-water infrastructure and bioelectrochemical production of chemicals as a means to close the water-energy-food nexus gap. His project will focus on controlling the engineered nitrogen cycle by creating small-scale, decentralized bioelectrochemical ammonia production for farmers and developing educational tools to optimize reactive nitrogen through informed food choices.
Shilva Shrestha
, assistant professor, Environmental Health and Engineering
Proposal: “Engineering Robust and Stable Synthetic Microbial Consortia for Targeted Waste-To-Platform Chemical Conversion”
Shrestha develops sustainable biotechnologies that treat wastewater and recover valuable fuels, chemicals, and materials from waste biomass to support a circular carbon economy. The award will support her efforts turning low-value waste from dairy farms and breweries into useful industrial chemicals using specially designed communities of microbes, and to improve the production of caproate, a chemical used in fuels, cosmetics, animal feed, and other products.
Yu Sun, assistant professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Proposal: “Provable, Flexible, and Scalable Integration of Physical and Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Imaging”
Sun integrates machine learning, computer vision, optimization, and physics to build more reliable and interpretable imaging systems that can reconstruct meaningful visual information from complex or incomplete data. His award will fund a project to develop imaging methods that integrate physical and diffusion models to produce probabilistic reconstructions—capturing a range of possible images and quantifying uncertainty, enabling researchers and clinicians to better assess confidence and ambiguity.