In fall 2025, the University of California launched the Early Career Faculty Research Awards, offering researchers a $50,000 award to support meaningful work at the beginning stages of a faculty member’s research. Each of the ten UC campuses could nominate up to ten researchers for consideration. According to the UC Office of the President, the intention of the awards was to advance the university’s commitment to early-career faculty, particularly in areas that had limited funding access, whether because of a loss of federal funding or because the work was a new research direction for the applicant.

This spring, two faculty members at The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering received awards, which were given to a total of fifty-five people across the ten campuses. Assistant professor of bioengineering Marley Dewey will use her award to translate her research on designing biomaterials for bone repair into a new approach to restore damaged coral reefs. Assistant professor of chemical engineering J. Tyler Mefford will focus on how to use electrochemistry to develop better ways to store and use renewable energy.

Marley Dewey: Repairing Coral Reefs

Marley Dewey loves the water. As a kid, she swam competitively, and her family vacations revolved around water — including a trip to Puerto Rico when she snorkeled through beautiful reefs. “I remember thinking, This is amazing,” she said. “They were so pristine.” 

But on a visit to Hawaii in graduate school, the reefs looked different. “Everything was dead,” she says. Rising ocean temperatures, acidification from runoff, plastic pollution, and other threats were killing the reefs and the species they supported. “In that moment,” she said, “I really wished I could do something about it.”

“We’re so thrilled that the University system has recognized Marley’s innovative ideas to expand her research supporting human health to address environmental health as well,” said Michelle O’Malley, interim chair of the Department of Bioengineering and a professor of bioengineering and chemical engineering.

With the award, Dewey plans to focus on identifying minerals that could be added to a biomaterial, and then determine how the mineral content might be adjusted to achieve the combination ideal for coral repair. “Our bones and coral reefs have very similar structures, and even some of the same chemical features,” Dewey said. The similarity has led researchers to use fragments of coral to improve human bone repair. “But no one has tried this principle in reverse.” 

Other minerals, including  strontium, magnesium, and zinc, are also found in both bone and coral, Dewey said. “So, we’d like to understand if there’s an ideal combination of minerals that can help to improve coral growth.” 

Her work may also help other researchers who are studying coral reefs by providing new methods for growing corals outside of aquariums and the ocean. Corals are made up of many tiny creatures called coral polyps. These polyps secrete calcium carbonate to form their skeleton; when coral polyps grow together in colonies, these skeletons can create the foundation of a reef. 

Currently, many researchers study coral in the lab by clipping off a piece of coral and gluing this to an inert substrate in large aquariums, a process which can take months. Dewey and her lab want to accelerate the possibility of discovery by culturing multiple individual polyps, or even individual cells from polyps, so that they could be tested using multiple combinations of minerals and substrates at the same time, making it possible to more quickly identify potential candidates to support coral repair. “If we can optimize some of the methods people use to study coral, then others could use those same processes to accelerate coral discoveries,” she says, adding “We need faster solutions, and we need better solutions.”

Dewey brings an interdisciplinary approach to her research, whether she is working with clinicians in her bone-repair work or with professors who study coral in the UCSB Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology. “With all my work, I would love to see it helping, whether to repair injuries in people or, eventually, corals in the ocean,” she said. “The water has always been a second home for me, so giving back to it through research feels like coming full circle.”

J. Tyler Mefford:  Better Renewable Energy through Electrochemistry

Ever since his childhood in Houston, Texas, Tyler Mefford has been aware of the importance of energy. Most of the people he knew were involved in the oil and gas industry, but Mefford was interested in a different approach: renewables. “Over the course of my career,” he said, “I’ve been trying to identify where electrochemistry can fit into solving the major challenges in climate change and renewable energy.”

Mefford, an electrochemical engineer, is working to support the development of a fully renewable energy grid. While renewable energy is clean and relatively inexpensive to generate, it’s not always available, shifting both day to day and across the seasons. Particularly when it comes to solar energy, the biggest challenge “is figuring out how to shift the energy that we produce in excess in the summer so that we’re able to use it in the winter," Mefford, said, “and to do this at a cost that allows everyone around the world to access that energy at a price comparable to what they’re used to paying.” 

Around the time Mefford came to UCSB, in 2024, he realized that the only way to solve this problem would be to identify chemistries that would allow for cost-effective storage of energy at an enormous scale. He and his colleagues identified liquid-based chemical reactions as the most promising. “Liquids enable us to store and transport chemicals at very low cost, and the transformations that we would use in the process would be aimed at adding and removing hydrogen from those chemicals,” Mefford said. "These rechargeable liquid organic hydrogen carriers focus on commodity chemicals that the world already produces in millions of tonnes per year, making them not only scalable but already low cost."

When Mefford considers how this technology would look as part of the energy grid, he envisions  a concept that straddles a fuel cell used for gas, and a redox flow battery used for liquids. At a power station, his approach would likely involve large installations of fuel cells adjacent to storage tanks for liquid organic hydrogen carriers. The fuel cells would provide the power, while the hydrogen would store the energy. “The way you make energy storage very low cost is to scale energy independently of power,” he said. His approach could create the potential to store enormous amounts of energy, while generating — and paying for — power only when it’s needed.

The UC award will allow Mefford to pursue a critical step: identifying catalysts with the ability to drive the hydrogenation and de-hydrogenation reactions that will allow the system to store and move energy. “We have some preliminary computational work that we've used to try to predict the best catalyst for this reaction,” Mefford says, “but a lot of that goes into assumptions about how the reaction actually proceeds.” 

Using a combination of UCSB fabrication facilities and lab equipment that he and his team have designed and built, Mefford and his colleagues are testing their computational predictions and developing techniques that allow them to watch catalysts in action. Learning more about how the reaction works, he said, will allow them to further refine their search. 

"Strengthening renewable energy technology is a critical part of the response to climate change," said Michael Gordon, a chemical engineering professor and chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering. "Tyler, with his work to harness electrochemistry to better support the renewable grid, has great potential to make a difference, and we're delighted that this award will help him forge ahead with this research."

The work may be the beginning of a long journey to develop a catalyst, and in turn, create an impact on renewable energy. But for Mefford, the potential for improved renewable-energy technology to make an impact on climate change is worth every step. "The most severe impacts we will feel in our lifetime, and the solutions to mitigate those impacts, need to be developed, scaled, and implemented in the next twenty to twenty-five years," he said. “That’s basically my entire career.”