2022 Research Celebration
Celebrating and highlighting research achievements
On April 7, faculty researchers from across the University gathered at the FedEx Institute of Technology to celebrate research and principal investigators’ (PIs) accomplishments over the last year. Honored were the Class of 2022 PI Millionaires; FY21 PIs; FY21 Research Book Publications; first-time PIs; and two NSF CAREER awardees.
Among the PIs honored, two faculty were highlighted for receiving a CAREER award.
First, Dr. Ana Doblas, assistant professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Herff College of Engineering, received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award in the amount of $593,239 for her project titled, “Three-dimensional super-resolution light microscopy of thick, unprocessed biological samples.” Doblas and her team will develop an innovative imaging system for unstained cells, tissues and organs. Current imaging systems cannot image thick unstained biological samples with high resolution resulting in the distortion of cell size and shape and the inability to view the dynamic changes and behaviors occurring in 3D cell shapes.
“I am so excited and honored to receive funding and support from the National Science Foundation,” said Doblas, principal investigator (PI) on the project. “The intellectual merit of our proposed imaging system includes novel advances in hardware and computational methods. The evaluation of our proposed system will be performed using calibrated manufactured objects and relevant biological specimens including human neuroblastoma cells, primary murine stem cells and murine blastocysts. Our interdisciplinary team will systematically compare images obtained with the proposed instrumentation with images from existing methods including confocal microscopy, the Lionheart FX system, and the NanoLive platform.” (Quote source: UofM Press Release)
The second, Dr. Maryam Salehi, assistant professor of Civil Engineering in the Herff College of Engineering, received a $453,144 National Science Foundation CAREER Award for her project titled, “An Investigation of Microplastics Fate and Contaminant Transport in Storm Runoff, The Nexus of Environmental Engineering and Material Sciences.”
“The goal of this NSF CAREER project is to utilize interdisciplinary research of material science and environmental engineering to close the critical knowledge gap on the environmental degradation of microplastics and how they facilitate the transport of heavy metals in urban stormwater,” said Salehi. (Quote source: UofM Press Release)
A full review of research PIs honored at this year's event are available in the 2022 Research Celebration Program.
About NSF CAREER
The NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.