Air Force officials invest $12 million in research program

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ARLINGTON, Va. (AFNS) --  Air Force Office of Scientific Research officials here announced Oct. 17 they will award approximately $12.1 million in grants to 39 scientists and engineers who submitted winning research proposals through the Air Force's Young Investigator Research Program.

The program is open to scientists and engineers at research institutions across the United States who hold a doctorate or achieved an equivalent degree in the last five years and show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research.

The Young Investigator Research Program, or YIP, fosters creative basic research in science and engineering, enhances early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increases opportunities for the young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and the related challenges in science and engineering.

According to AFOSR officials, competition for the YIP award is intense. This year, the AFOSR broad agency announcement solicitation in major areas of interest to the Air Force resulted in 210 proposals. The areas of interest included aerospace, chemical and material sciences, physics and electronics, and mathematics, information and life sciences. AFOSR officials selected proposals based on the evaluation criteria listed in the broad agency announcement.

Those selected will receive the grants over a three-year period. Recipients and their projected research areas are: 
-- Dr. Calin Belta from Boston University who will conduct formal synthesis of control and communication strategies for teams of unmanned vehicles. 
-- Dr. Sergiy Butenko of Texas Engineering Experiment Station who will develop novel optimization techniques for analysis of biological and social networks.
-- Dr. Soon-Jo Chung from Iowa State University who will investigate bio-inspired integrated sensing and control flapping flight for micro aerial vehicles. 
-- Dr. Myra Cohen of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who will conduct research to produce measured confidence level for adaptive targeted testing of software product lines.
--· Dr. Joseph Comberiate from the JHU Applied Physics Laboratory who will investigate space-based 3-D imaging of equatorial plasma bubbles. 
-- Dr. Gregory Engel from the University of Chicago who will work on harnessing solar power for endothermic chemical reactions: a novel strategy for rational design of photocatalysts. 
-- Dr. Thomas Epps of the University of Delaware who will find a new approach to ion-conducting network membranes using tapered block copolymers. 
-- Dr. Javier Garay from the University of California, Riverside, who will focus on producing 3-D nanostructured magnetic materials for novel magnetic devices. 
-- Dr. Gustaaf Jacobs from San Diego State University who will study high-order particle-mesh algorithms for shock particle physics in combustion and explosion. 
-- Dr. Odest Jenkins of Brown University who will develop coordinating robotic networks through belief propagation. 
-- Dr. Lalana Kagal of MIT who will conduct studies for Web-based Policy Interoperability via a Semantic Policy Interlingua. 
-- Dr. Endawoke Kassie from the University of California, Los Angeles, who will research the physics behind ionospheric and plasmaspheric density irregularities. 
-- Dr. Irena Knezevic from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who will work on semiconductor nanowire and nanoribbon thermoelectrics. 
-- Dr. Pavlo Krokhmal of the University of Iowa who will conduct probabilistic analysis of combinatorial optimization problems on hypergraph matchings. 
-- Dr. Tonghun Lee from Michigan State University who will study laser diagnostics of plasma-assisted combustion for scramjet applications. 
-- Dr. Benjamin Lev from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who will explore quantum liquid crystals using ultracold dipolar atoms. 
-- Dr. Jun Lou from Rice University who will investigate temperature and scale dependent mechanical behavior in metallic nanostructures. 
-- Dr. Paulo Lozano of MIT who will work on fully scalable porous metal electrospray propulsion. 
-- Dr. Belinda Marchand from the University of Texas at Austin who will focus on optimal constellation design for maximum continuous coverage of targets against a space background. 
-- Dr. Michael McAlpine from Princeton University who will study biomimetic nanosensor arrays for selective small molecule detection. 
-- Dr. Casey Miller from the University of South Florida who will develop giant magnetocaloric alloys via nanostructuring and interfacial exchange interactions. 
-- Dr. Hanifah Muliana of the Texas Engineering Experiment Station who will conduct multi-field analysis of smart morphing composites at multiple time and length scales. 
-- Dr. James Patterson from Brigham Young University who will work on the molecular basis of adhesion. 
-- Dr. Shashank Priya of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University who will address domain engineered magnetoelectric thin films for high sensitivity resonant magnetic field sensors. 
-- Dr. Jason Schmidt from the Air Force Institute of Technology who will research advanced wavefront estimation in strong turbulence. 
-- Dr. Jay Sharping of the University of California, Merced, who will develop compact fiber-parametric devices for biophotonics applications. 
-- Dr. Matthew Shawkey from the University of Akron who will study avian nanostructured tissues as models for new defensive coatings and photonic crystal fibers. 
-- Dr. Christian Skalka of the University of Vermont who will develop a language-based approach to wireless sensor network security. 
-- Dr. Gookwon Edward Suh from Cornell University who will study heterogeneous multicore platform through diversity and redundancy for enhancing the security of future systems. 
-- Dr. Gita Sukthankar of the University of Central Florida who will work on improving synthesis and recognition of crowded scenes using statistical models of group behavior. 
-- Dr. Jeffrey Sutton from the Ohio State University who will investigate spatio-temporal characteristics of scalar mixing and dissipation processes in turbulent jets and flames. 
-- Dr. Erik Thostenson from the University of Delaware who will study novel micro- and nano-structured composites for sensing and actuation. 
-- Dr. Vikas Tomar of the University of Notre Dame who will investigate nanoscale thermal conduction and mechanical strength correlation in high temperature ceramics. 
-- Dr. Katherine Willets from the University of Texas at Austin who will work on mapping local shape-dependent EM field enhancements in single metallic nanoparticles using stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy. 
-- Dr. Robert Wood from Harvard College who will conduct a comprehensive study of aeroelasticity in flapping-wing MAVs. 
-- Dr. Dapeng Wu from the University of Florida who will develop a joint information theoretic and differential geometrical approach for robust automated target recognition. 
-- Dr. Huili Xing from the University of Notre Dame who will research quantum limits of nitride RF high-electron mobility transistors. 
-- Dr. Deniz Yavuz of the University of Wisconsin-Madison who will focus on refractive index enhancement in gases. 
-- Dr. Gleb Yushin of the Georgia Tech Research Corporation who will investigate multifunctional ultralight Mg-Li alloy nanocomposites.

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