Three University of Vermont professors have been honored with National Science Foundation CAREER Awards for their outstanding contributions to science.
The UVM trio includes College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences (CEMS) professors Mads Almassalkhi and Ryan McGinnis, both from the Electrical and Biomedical Engineering Department, and the College of Arts and Science’s (CAS) Michael Ruggiero (Chemistry). The three honorees join nearly 30 other CAREER grant winners in both CEMS and CAS over the past 20 years.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 "to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; [and] to secure the national defense..." The agency’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the NSF’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 organization. The awards, presented once each year, include a federal grant for research and education activities for five consecutive years.
Mads Almassalkhi, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Biomedical Engineering Department and Co-founder, Packetized Energy
"Working with Mads has always been an absolute delight. He is thoughtful, creative and enthusiastic. As well as being a very talented researcher, Mads is a natural leader who is organized, responsive, positive and encouraging. He has the creativity for
developing new theories, the analytical abilities for rigorously testing them, and the practical insights required for implementation. His NSF CAREER award is one more step in what promises to be a long and impactful career."
– Ian Hiskens, Almassalkhi’s Ph.D. advisor, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
How long have you been with UVM?
Six-and-a-half years or so. My wife, Brittany, and I moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan to South Burlington, Vermont, in Aug 2014 with our two small children. We welcomed our third child (and first Vermonter) in 2016.
What is the current focus of your research?
The goal of my lab, the CORE (Control and Optimization of Renewable Energy) Systems Lab, is to fundamentally advance our understanding of how power and energy systems can enable a clean energy future by becoming more efficient, reliable, and resilient. Towards this objective, our group has been working for the past number of years on:
- Distributed control algorithms that can coordinate a large fleet of smart loads to deliver valuable grid services in the aggregate and
- Advanced optimization algorithms for coordinating networked energy resources.
However, real-time control algorithms tend to ignore grid constraints and network optimization algorithms are generally not real-time executable. To support vast electrification and digitalization trends, we need the best of both worlds: real-time, grid-aware control of distributed resources. That is why I am excited about the new CAREER award, as it allows me to close this gap by advancing the state-of-the-science in optimization and control of networked distributed energy resources. The basic idea is to construct special convex inner approximations of non-convex sets to inform the design of real-time controllers that implicitly guarantee grid constraints are satisfied. This allows us to maximize the amount of flexible demand and solar PV we can put at each location in the grid and offers a new way to think about grid hosting capacity. Our preliminary results are promising, but there is a long way to go still on this exciting journey.
How has your research shifted throughout your career thus far?
My work has shifted quite a bit since I completed my PhD. When I joined UVM, my research had been focused on resilience of large-scale (>100,000 volts) transmission systems like the ones that struggled in Texas last month — I even did some gas-electric network modeling and optimization back then. However, at that time, my Ph.D. advisor had a team of 2-3 post-docs and 3-4 PhD students working in that same direction at Michigan. So, I thought about other venues that were a) interesting/fun; b) impactful; and c) not overly crowded (at the time). Fortunately, with support from EE colleagues Jeff Frolik and Paul Hines, I was able to convince DOE’s ARPA-E to fund ideas around Packetized Energy management, which has since taken off and focuses on control of large-scale distributed systems. That pushed me into a new field ("load control”). DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) was also generous enough to fund new concepts around control and optimization in low voltage distribution networks, which pushed me into another field (“distribution optimal power flow”). The two DOE projects allowed my research to grow into focus and distinguish myself from my prior PhD work and, most importantly, to establish a new network of collaborators, which has been incredibly rewarding.
What does winning the NSF CAREER Grant mean to you?
Partly relief and partly pride. Relief, because I had never submitted a CAREER proposal until this year, so it was my first and last opportunity. In addition, Brittany and I set aside a 1-week period starting Aug 3, where I would focus on writing (proposal was due Aug 11). This made the CAREER a huge, intense family undertaking (as many proposals are) and I am relieved that the family investment paid off — I just need to find a way to cover Brittany's summer effort :) I am also proud of the award, because I have never been funded by NSF before and the recommendation of funding comes from senior academics in my field, which is nice recognition of my efforts to date.
What does this grant mean for your research?
Research is all about risk-taking, because if we knew the answers or knew it would work out from the start, then it’s not research. Thus, the CAREER award validates that some of the risky ideas I am most excited about these days are worth pursing and allows me to focus on these topics for the next couple of years.
What are three ways you hope that your work will impact the world?
i) I hope my work will help support grid operators and smart grid technology providers in making the grid cleaner. As we march towards mitigating the effects of climate change with renewable generation (wind, solar PV) and electrification efforts, power and energy systems will undergo a revolution from digitalization, decentralization, and democratization of energy. This creates interesting challenges between utilities (who manage the grid’s network reliably) and those that manage huge fleets smart inverters and electric loads (“Aggregators”, who want to maximize value of the devices to their owners). My hope is that my work can establish tools/mechanisms and markets that allow both parties to effectively and cooperatively work together without one having to be the other or sacrificing reliability of the grid. This is why I am excited to have the support of one of the country’s biggest utilities and one of the most prominent national labs on this project (ConEdison, who have a unique grid configuration, and PNNL, one of the premier national laboratories) and am looking forward to collaborate with utilities in Vermont (and beyond) on these topics…
ii) I hope my work will also help educate the public and create an inclusive environment for STEM education by designing public workshops and a new course on gamification around climate change and energy system challenges that help people discover answers to the question of: “What is a kWh?” Electricity is cheap and people generally do not care much about the complexities of the grid challenges we are facing, unless what happened in Texas happens to them. If we want to democratize and decentralize energy, we need people to understand the basic building blocks, challenges, and opportunities ahead without having to know what NERC, FERC, AGC, OLTC, and DERMS stand for :)
iii) I hope my work will enable my students to become leaders and doers and have a positive impact on the world. Being a professor is all about the long game. The timescales of our research projects (federal or industry), publications, and our mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students in on the order of years. It is easy to get lost in the now and become frustrated in academia, but when I look at my short career so far and see former students (Anna, Micah, Lincoln, Zach, Mahraz, Nawaf) and current students (Adil, Hani, Sam, Rebecca) doing well, it is so inspiring and motivating. I am excited for what the next six years holds!
What is one piece of advice you would give to emerging scientists (students and others)?
Practice a 30-second pitch of your research project/proposal/paper: what problem are you solving, what is the impact if you solve it, why is it hard, and why are you the person to solve it. You will need this pitch when you talk to collaborators, program managers, Deans, Chairs, and any proposal should have this clearly explained on the first page or in a figure :)
Ryan McGinnis, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Biomedical Engineering Department and Assistant Director, Biomedical Engineering Program
“Ryan [McGinnis] has been most influential in my development as an engineer and scientist. His sense for practical solutions to the most pressing problems in human health is most keen. He has a unique ability to develop practically deployable methods without compromising comprehensive assessment. As a mentor, he is just as devoted in facilitating the development of those working in his lab to contribute to these important healthcare issues. The NSF CAREER award is well-deserved.”
– Reed Gurchiek, former UVM Ph.D. student and current Postdoc
How long have you been with UVM?
I was the first faculty hire in biomedical engineering at UVM. I started as an assistant professor in 2017.
What is the current focus of your research and how has it shifted throughout your career thus far?
My research career started by investigating the way people swing golf clubs as an undergraduate mechanical engineering major. What started as a desire to improve my own golf game turned into a passion for research and a desire to make translational research a part of my career. During graduate school and my postdoctoral training, my focus shifted to developing instrumented sports equipment and eventually to characterizing athlete and soldier movement using wearable motion sensors. The goal of these projects was always to help users improve their performance or reduce their risk of injury. In conducting this work, it became clear that the technologies we were developing could be deployed to address important and unmet healthcare problems including reaching individuals from understudied or underserved populations. This idea has led to my group’s mission, which is to empower patients with digital health technologies.
My group (the M-Sense Research Group) develops digital health technologies. Digital health researchers leveraging data from wearables or mobile phones, devices that we carry around with us every day, to capture objective measures of human health and deliver interventions for improving health. Our current research efforts are focused on developing digital biomarkers, phenotypes, and therapeutics for improving the mobility and functional independence of persons with multiple sclerosis, optimizing orthopedic rehabilitation outcomes, and most relevant here, addressing mental health problems in children and young adults.
Our focus on mental health is a relatively new development and is a result of what has become a very fun (and successful!) collaboration with my wife, Dr. Ellen McGinnis, who is a Clinical Psychologist and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at UVM. Ellen has also received a Career Development Award from the NIH that is aligned with the work we aim to conduct in in this CAREER project. Read more about their work:
- AI Can Detect Depression in a Child’s Speech
- Wearable Sensor Could Detect Hidden Anxiety, Depression in Young Children
- New UVM-developed App Could Help Panic Attack Sufferers During Coronavirus Pandemic
What does winning the NSF CAREER Grant mean to you?
I am honored to receive this award and am very happy that NSF has identified this area of childhood mental health as a topic that is important for research investment.
What does this grant mean for your research?
I am incredibly thankful that the NSF has seen merit in this work. This award will allow us to advance an important project that has a real chance to improve our understanding of the pathophysiology that underlies childhood mental health problems and could improve our ability to identify children with anxiety and depression. Moreover, the platform developed as part of this project could help to advance the digital health field and speed its application to a variety of clinical domains. In addition to these scientific advances, this CAREER grant will allow us to establish an annual digital mental health hackathon that will be hosted by UVM’s Center for Biomedical Innovation and will involve high school and college students, industry professionals, and faculty from throughout the state. I hope that this will bring awareness to digital health, and particularly as applied to childhood mental health, as an important topic of study that students may not have previously considered.
What are some ways you hope that your work will impact the world?
- Improve the detection of childhood mental health problems so that children with psychopathology can be directed to care when it can make the most difference
- Expand the use of digital health technologies in vulnerable and underserved populations to improve access to healthcare.
- Increase awareness of mental health problems, continue to destigmatize mental health, and advance recognition that mental health is health.
- Advance the inclusion of a diverse group of innovators in the development of digital health technologies
What is one piece of advice you would give to emerging scientists (students and others)?
Today’s most pressing problems are fundamentally interdisciplinary and I believe that an interdisciplinary perspective and team-science approach is required to develop effective solutions. The best advice I can give to emerging scientists is to embrace interdisciplinary exploration and teamwork as the skills you learn in these areas will pay the largest dividends in the future.
Michael Ruggiero, Assistant Professor — Physical Chemistry, Materials Science, and Computational Chemistry
“Mike [Ruggiero] brings a huge amount of energy and enthusiasm to the table, and also world-leading expertise in the computational techniques and experimental methods of terahertz spectroscopy. His CAREER award is very well deserved.”
– Professor Daniel Mittleman, longtime collaborator, Brown University
How long have you been with UVM?
This is my third year. I am originally from New York, and after obtaining my degrees in upstate New York (at SUNY Geneseo and Syracuse University), I went across the pond to Cambridge for a postdoctoral fellowship. I never thought I’d end up back in the Northeast, but I’ve fallen in love with Vermont and haven’t looked back since!
What is the current focus of your research and how has it shifted throughout your career thus far?
My research is focused on understanding the atomic-level forces that shape the properties of materials. This is intentionally very broad, and so is my research - we investigate the properties of materials that have applications in everything from flexible phone technology to carbon dioxide sequestration.
I’ve always been interested in breaking down why the world works into the most basic physical concepts, I was always the kid saying “okay, but why” whenever I asked how things worked, and this has been the driving force behind my career. Over my career, I have picked up new tools to add to my arsenal for finding those types of answers, and UVM has been a great place to really take the research to new directions owing the many, many interdisciplinary collaborations I’ve formed here. I’m a member of the Gund Institute for Environment and the Materials Science program, both of which have been crucial to the success of my research program.
What does winning the NSF CAREER Grant mean to you?
There are so many emotions! Gratitude, validation, relief, and excitement for what it will enable. It’s an amazing opportunity, to have your crazy ideas funded for five years, and the limitless potential for what it will lead to. For starters, none of this would’ve been possible without my extremely talented research group (Ruggiero Research Lab), whose Herculean efforts are what provided the underlying foundation on which my proposal was built. They are the real stars in this story.
What does this grant mean for your research?
Excitement for what it will enable - there is so much cool science and outreach associated with this project, and I can’t wait to see where it all goes. In the lab, we are going to be performing all sorts of exciting experiments that will allow us to design new materials for applications in photovoltaics (solar cells), digital displays (flexible screens), and computing. This grant enables us to assemble a great team to tackle these problems. Additionally, it provides funding to initiate two new collaborations that are really interesting - one with the Fleming Museum of Art on campus, and the other is the Mount Mansfield Unified School District. At the Fleming, we are going to build a new instrument that is capable of seeing previous layers underneath finished artwork - potentially revealing insight into the evolution of the artwork, revealing hidden images/signatures, and so on. Simultaneously, we are going to build an exhibit at Fleming for the public, and will showcase this research in real-time, so the public can see the research in action. We are also going to organize workshops for K-12 students, so they can come to campus and learn about how science and art go together much more often than typically imagined.
What are three ways you hope that your work will impact the world?
Teaching is my passion, and I view my research program as a means of educating young scientists and giving students the tools they need to achieve their goals. I also am driven by how the scientific community builds on the work of others, and I love seeing how my colleagues utilize my work to open up new lines of research. Finally, I am excited to give back to the local community, because so much of science occurs in the academic ivory tower, and I’m really looking forward to putting on the public workshops and engaging with K-12 students to showcase what’s going on at UVM.
What is one piece of advice you would give to emerging scientists (students and others)?
Engage with people from dissimilar backgrounds. Collaboration has been a huge component of my research, and being able to bridge dissimilar fields is a major asset to performing cutting-edge research.