Each award provides up to $500,000 over five years to enable early-career academic scientists and engineers “to tackle important and unique research challenges and to make our country’s future healthier, safer and more prosperous,” said Dawn Tilbury, head of NSF’s Engineering directorate.

This year’s new awardees from the School of Engineering and Applied Science are:

José Avalos, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, for the project Closed-loop control of engineered metabolism using biosensors and optogenetics;

Ian Bourg, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and the Princeton Environmental Institute, for the project Coupled hydrology and mechanics of fine-grained soils and sedimentary rocks;

Nathalie de Leon, assistant professor of electrical engineering, for the project Novel diamond surface functionalization and nanoscale surface spectroscopy for quantum applications;

Barbara Engelhardt, associate professor of computer science, for the project Recovering complex associations from high-dimensional genomic data;

Gillat Kol, assistant professor of computer science, for the project Communication, information, and interactive compression;

Andrej Kosmrlj, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, for the project Statistical mechanics of slender structures;

and Mark Zhandry, assistant professor of computer science, for the project Cryptography and privacy in the age of quantum computers.