During the last two years, the University of Memphis has received five NSF Early Career awards, and of these, three have gone to female engineering junior faculty members. Dr. Amber Jennings (Biomedical Engineering), Dr. Ana Doblas (Electrical Engineering), and Dr. Maryam Salehi (Civil Engineering) were each awarded this prestigious award to advance their work. This is a testament to the growing strength of the research programs in all Herff College of Engineering departments and the top-tier research talent that the University of Memphis is attracting. According to the Society of Women Engineers, only 13% of all engineers and 17% of engineering faculty are women. The University of Memphis currently falls below that national average, with women representing 15% of Herff faculty. Recent federal funding through the NSF ASPIRE project, PI: Dr. Esra Ozdenerol (Earth Sciences) is working to address equity and bring resources to support this highly productive research cohort.
About NSF Career
The National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award is a faculty early research development award that is designed to help a junior faculty member establish a lifelong research career and is one of the best predictors of future research funding success. The CAREER program is a Foundation-wide program that supports applied and basic science in all fields. In 2020, NSF received over 5000 applications to the CAREER program in the engineering directorate alone and on average funded 28% of proposals. Faculty submitting NSF Career proposals have three tries to submit their award, and the purpose of this is to allow new researchers to learn the review process for NSF. The 2020 recipients received their funding on the first try, which is a testament to the high caliber of their work and their proposal development skills.
Tennessee In Context
Between July 1, 2019 and today the State of Tennessee received 22 NSF CAREER award
notifications. Of these, 10 went to UTK, five to Vanderbilt, and four to the University
of Memphis. This is the most competitive year of CAREER funding for the UofM to date,
and the forthcoming submissions will advance this progress even further. For more
information on this, contact Dr. Cody Behles, director of Research Development and
Innovation at cbehles@memphis.edu.
