Wednesday, March 11, 2020
Three assistant professors from UC Santa Barbara’s College of Engineering — Elliot Hawkes and Alban Sauret, Department of Mechanical Engineering; and Kunal Mukherjee, Materials Department — have received the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Early CAREER Award for innovative and novel research in their respective fields. They will each receive roughly $500,000 in research funding to pursue scientific advancement through the NSF Faculty Early Career Development program.
Elliot Hawkes, Mechanical Engineering Department
Hawkes, who became an assistant professor at UCSB in 2016, will seek to better understand the factors that govern the movements of vine robots in order to design new soft robots for potentially life-saving applications. Read more about his project and how he was inspired by a plant on his bookshelf.
Kunal Mukherjee, Materials Department
Mukherjee will explore a different class of electronic materials known as IV-VI semiconductors, which have very unusual atomic bonding. Read more about his project and its potential impacts.
Alban Sauret, Mechanical Engineering
Sauret, who joined the faculty at UCSB in fall 2018, will focus on advancing the understanding of suspension flows under confinement. He seeks to improve process efficiency and bolster the development of new coating processes on heterogeneous capillary flows. Read more about the project.
NSF Early CAREER Award winners (from let) Kunal Mukherjee, Elliot Hawkes, Alban Sauret