Dr. Frederic Sansoz, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, UVM School of Engineering, was recently awarded a $400,000 NSF CAREER grant for his work on Microstructure and Size Effects on Metal Plasticity at Limited Length Scale. This five year grant will provide funding to further his research and "will also broadly advance the understanding in the field while promoting educational training of undergraduate and graduate students involved in the research project. In particular, this award is expected to enhance the education of students in the area of high performance and parallel computing, and high-resolution imaging."
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.
Dr. Sansoz explained the significance of the research by saying, "The nanoscale is unique because it is the size scale where the familiar day-to-day properties of materials like hardness and strength meet the more exotic properties of the atomic and molecular world. For example, nanoscale wires of gold, which is naturally a very soft metal, are ultra-strong materials with strengths up to 100 times that of bulk metals. The proposed research is to gain fundamental understanding of the size-effects associated with microstructural features and sample dimension on the strength of such metallic "nanowires". To accomplish this, we will use a combined experimental/modeling research approach harnessing the power of both atomistic simulation and atomic force microscopy. This combination of methodologies will be very successful in bridging the gap between experiment and modeling in the mechanical characterization of nanomaterials. This research is also expected to show new ways to fabricate nanorods and nanowires with specific defects that make them stronger; thereby providing a roadmap for others to make improved materials. For me, the support from Vermont EPSCoR over the past four years was crucial to obtain this grant. In particular, VT-EPSCoR provided me with start-up funding and several mini-grants for equipment acquisition, which have been used to buy key laboratory instruments such as high-resolution microscopes specifically-designed for nanomechanical analysis. Also, the simulation component of this project will be conducted via massively-parallel molecular dynamics simulations performed using UVM's newly-established Vermont Advanced Computing Center."
Dr. Sansoz said of the award, "It is a great honor to receive this award and be placed amongst some of the top American researchers in my field. With this opportunity, I will be able to conduct some fundamental research in the area of metallic nanomaterials, which can dramatically improve the existing state of knowledge in the experimental and computational mechanics community. The educational component of this 5-year grant will also broadly revitalize the interest for materials science and engineering at UVM, help recruit engineering students from underrepresented groups, and stimulate international student exchanges with several European engineering-specific programs at undergraduate level via the existing International Student Exchange Program. I sincerely want to thank Vermont EPSCoR and my colleagues from the mechanical engineering program, the materials science program, and the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences for their continuous encouragement through the preparation of this award."
Further information about the award from NSF website at:
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0747658
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