MSU faculty have successfully garnered over $7 million in funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support their ongoing research. NSF CAREER Awards support junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research and education. It is among the NSF’s most prestigious national honors and a major milestone for early career faculty. 

Patton Allison, assistant professor in the College of Engineering, will use a five-year $590,000 CAREER Award to investigate liquid fuels in turbulent reacting flows while developing new laser diagnositcs to investigate how different fuels mix and interact with each other.

Jason Bazil, assistant professor in the Department of Physiology in the College of Osteopathic Medicine and in the BioMolecular Science Gateway in the College of Natural Science, will use his $888,014, five-year CAREER award to expand his ischemic heart disease research by demonstrating that ultrastructure (how the various compartments inside mitochondria are aligned, distributed and connected) is a major governing factor behind the metabolic behavior of mitochondria.

Shaunak Bopardikar, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering, will use a five-year $500,000 CAREER Award to tackle security issues during sensing, communication, and control attacks in modern and autonomous vehicles while also developing educational games on the subject.

Terrance Burgess, an assistant professor in the College of Education, has a $630,000 grant that will investigate how elementary school children become central factors in developing better science curricula and how children can enact change in their community.

Haseung Chung, assistant professor in the College of Engineering, will use a five-year, $567,000 CAREER Award to improve the challenges of metal additive manufacturing in metal powder sedimentation, curing capacity and possible oxidation-related defects.

Elizabeth Dorrance Hall, an assistant professor in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, will use her five-year $1,300,000 CAREER Award to study how parents communicate with their daughters about careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Zhen Qiu, assistant professor in the College of Engineering, will use a five-year, $503,600 CAREER Award on the development of a tiny microscope for molecularly targeted imaging to study the fundamental mechanism of brain tumors.

Debajit Saha, assistant professor in the College of Engineering, will use a $550,000 five-year CAREER Award to enable the early detection of cancer using lung cancer volatile chemicals present in breath and the olfactory neural circuits of insects.

stef shuster, associate professor in the College of Social Science, will examine how historical efforts to control human resporduction have shaped the ways scientists and the medical field have come to understand reproductive health.

Tuo Wang, assistant professor in the College of Natural Science, will use his NSF grant for training and education for the next generation of biophysical scientists from kindergarten through postdoctoral training. He aims to make biophysical and biomolecular studies more accessible to a diverse pool of students.

Nathan Whitehorn, assistant professor in the College of Natural Science, will use his $811,000 grant to discover the origin of cosmic rays at high energies, which come to Earth at energies millions of times higher than any man-made accelerator can produce.

Yang Yang, an assistant professor in the Colleges of Engineering and Natural Science, will use a five-year $419,000 CAREER Award to better understand the mathematical principles in non-destructive probing techniques.