Michael Shields Receives Early Career Support from the Department of Energy

Michael D. Shields, assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science to receive a five-year grant under the agency’s Early Career Research Program.

The award recognizes young scientists and engineers who have received their doctorates in the last 10 years. The program is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during their crucial early career years.

Shields’ research is focused on uncertainty quantification for wide-ranging problems in computational mechanics and computational materials science, with the goal of understanding the effects of uncertainties and random variations on the performance of materials and structures. His project—“Low-dimensional manifold learning for Uncertainty Quantification in Complex Multi-scale Stochastic Systems”—leverages large-scale dimension hyper-reduction methods to enable uncertainty quantification for complex multi-scale systems.

This is Shields’ third young investigator award. He is also the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.