Eleven UC Riverside faculty members this year have been awarded prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Awards. These awards support early career faculty who demonstrate the potential to serve as academic role models and advance their organization’s mission. Research conducted with these funds is intended to form the foundation for a lifetime of leadership, integrating education and research. 

UCR’s 2022 CAREER Award recipients and the projects funded by the award are listed alphabetically, below.

Kandis Abdul-Aziz 

Chemical & Environmental Engineering

Greenhouse gases are made of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, methane and nitrous oxide from agricultural activities, and fluorinated gasses from industrial processes. One strategy to reduce these CO2 emissions is to capture and convert those molecules into higher-value chemicals – the approach Abdul-Aziz is taking with this CAREER Award.

She will use a special family of perovskite materials to both capture CO2 and catalyze its conversion into hydrocarbons through reaction with methane. These hydrocarbons – syngas, ethane and ethylene – can be readily converted into polymers and fuel for energy and chemical raw materials.

Xi Chen 

Electrical & Computer Engineering 

Chen’s research focuses on the design and synthesis of advanced functional materials for thermal management, energy conversion and storage, and quantum information processing applications. The title of his CAREER award is “Understanding the Size Effects on Spin-mediated Thermal Transport in Nanostructured Quantum Magnets.”

This project aims to develop a fundamental understanding of the heat transport mechanisms in magnetic materials. The knowledge gained will potentially enable the development of magnetic materials as effective heat transport channels for thermal management in microelectronic devices, as well as a data-bus for quantum science-based devices.

Yongtao Cui

Physics & Astronomy

Cui’s research focuses on the study of electronic properties in nano materials enabled by development of characterization tools with unique capabilities. The title of the CAREER research project is "Study of Electronic and Magnetic Topological Phenomena in Two Dimensional Quantum Materials with Scanning Probe Microscopy."

This project studies new 2D materials with only a few layers of atoms. Stacking different layers together often generates novel types of electronic or magnetic states at the layer interfaces. The CAREER award supports the Cui lab’s research efforts to explore the topological properties of these states, which could help understand material properties from a new angle beyond conventional theory and potentially lead to discovery of new functional materials.

James Davies

Chemistry

The Davies lab aims to connect the molecular properties and processes of aerosol particles to their impacts on air quality, climate, and human health. The CAREER award will support the lab’s work connecting the composition of light-absorbing aerosols with their properties and atmospheric impacts, providing detailed insight into the role of light-absorbing aerosols for climate and air quality studies. 

Basak Guler

Electrical & Computer Engineering

Guler researches resource-efficient, trustworthy communication and computation for large-scale wireless networks. The title of the CAREER research project is "Foundations of Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Learning."

The award will support research on efficient, secure, and trustworthy collaborative machine learning, to address several critical challenges in real-world privacy-preserving learning frameworks. The project will facilitate better AI models in fields where data is scarce and collaboration has traditionally been limited due to privacy challenges, such as healthcare and financial applications.

Boerge Hemmerling

Physics & Astronomy

The title of Hemmerling’s CAREER award is “Laser-Cooled Molecules in an AC-Storage Ring.” This project will produce cold samples of molecules that are inaccessible to traditional cooling techniques. This challenge stems from the internal complex structure of molecules, which complicates laser cooling applications. 

Hemmerling’s lab will develop an electric storage ring to overcome these challenges and allow cooling and trapping species which are not suitable for traditional cooling schemes. The ring provides, in principle, an infinite slowing distance and allows for using the spontaneous decay of long-lived molecular states as a necessary repumping mechanism in the cooling process. The lab will focus in particular on molecules that are interesting for probing for physics beyond the Standard Model. Cooling and trapping such molecules allows for full quantum control and will provide a path for establishing new molecules with enhanced sensitivities to probe for novel physics.

Yanran Li 

Chemical & Environmental Engineering

With this award, the Li laboratory will revolutionize our understanding of secondary metabolism in plants, which produces small molecules not essential for growth or reproduction but are required for a plant to survive in its environment. Her project also aims to create a cheaper and more sustainable supply of a particular phytohormone, develop it as an agrochemical and pharmaceutical, and help develop parasite resistance in cereal crops.

Cong Liu

Electrical & Computer Engineering

Liu’s expertise lies in a form of machine learning that is adversarial, which aims to trick machine learning models by providing deceptive input. Recent paper titles include: “AEVA: Black-box backdoor detecting using adversarial extreme value analysis,” and “NODEAttack: Adversarial attack on the energy consumption of Neural ODEs.”

Giulia Palermo 

Bioengineering

The Palermo lab studies properties of novel gene editing systems, such as CRISPR-Cas9, which is derived from the immune systems of bacteria. This project will use advanced computational methods to determine how CRISPR changes the chemical composition of DNA, cuts both strands of the DNA double helix, and targets RNA. Results from this study will help develop novel biotechnologies, such as nucleic acid detection and imaging. 

Nicole Rafferty 

Evolution, Ecology & Organismal Biology

Rafferty studies the interactions between plants and the insects that pollinate them, and looks at the ways climate change is affecting those interactions. For her CAREER project, Rafferty’s team will create experimental communities of native wildflowers and solitary bees, and will examine the effects of different warming treatments on both the bees and the flowers. 

The study will employ blue orchard bees, which are important pollinators of crops including almonds, and are also native bees that pollinate plants endemic to this region, including desert bluebell, baby blue eyes, and innocents. Rafferty’s team will look at the amount of nectar produced at different temperatures, flower size, seed volume and weight, along with other factors related to the success of pollination.

Bhargav Rallabandi

Mechanical Engineering

Rallabandi’s award supports the development of models that can predict and control microscopic particles suspended in liquid through rapid oscillations. The research has the potential to impact a wide range of applications including the manipulation of cells in biomedical devices, the assembly of particles into structures, and the development of swimming micro-robots.