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A record six UNH faculty members have received prestigious Faculty Early Development, or CAREER, awards from the National Science Foundation. CAREER grants are the NSF鈥檚 premier awards in support of 鈥渆arly-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 organizations.鈥� This year鈥檚 CAREER award recipients:

Yashar Azam, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, $678,675

Samuel Carton, assistant professor of computer science, $634,658

Aleksey Charapko, assistant professor of computer science, $594,158

Diliang Chen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, $552,723

Linqing Li, assistant professor of chemical engineering, $794,099听

Easton White, assistant professor of biological sciences, $993, 364

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Yashar Azam鈥檚 CAREER听grant will fund research that advances our understanding of floating infrastructure that could help coastal communities adapt to a changing climate and rising sea levels. His work aims to better monitor and protect floating structures like homes bridges by using a powerful new technology called a digital twin, a 鈥渟mart鈥� virtual copy of a real-world structure.

鈥淩eceiving this award 鈥� affirms the value of pursuing ambitious, long-term research goals that address real-world engineering challenges,鈥� Azam says. 鈥淚t also reinforces my commitment to developing practical tools that make our infrastructure more resilient, cost-effective, and safe for the public.鈥�

With his CAREER grant, Samuel Carton will help improve artificial intelligence-assisted decision making, already ubiquitous in fields like medicine, business and government. AI tools like ChatGPT are powerful decision-making assistants, he says, 鈥渂ut it can be hard for human decision-makers to verify AI advice and be fairly held liable for decisions they make with its assistance.鈥� He aims to solve these issues with explainability, inducing the model to explain the reasoning behind its decisions and developing effective ways of conveying these explanations to humans so they can verify model advice.

鈥淐racking tough problems around explainability and human-model collaboration is one of my principal long-term goals as a researcher, and this grant is a distillation of ideas I've been thinking about for years,鈥� Carton says.

Making large software systems and applications more reliable is the focus of Aleksy Charapko鈥檚 CAREER award. He will investigate metastable failure 鈥� feedback loops that continuously aggravate the failure and prevent the system from recovering 鈥� with the goal of mitigating the risks and impacts of metastable failures on software infrastructure like cloud systems. Charapko notes that these so-called 鈥渄eath spirals鈥� are far from theortical; several years ago a metastable failure in the cloud caused delayed shipments for on-line purchases, failures in streaming services, and interruptions in home technology like robotic vacuum cleaners and smart听pet food dispensers.听听

鈥淭his award signifies the recognition of the importance of the work we have been doing over the past four years and the importance of this emerging field of reliability research,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e want software technology to be reliable for the end-users so that no cats go hungry in dirty homes because the cloud stops working.鈥�

Falls are a leading cause of injury and loss of independence among adults aged 65 and older. Diliang Chen鈥檚 CAREER project aims to help prevent them by developing a smart insole system that can automatically monitor and assess fall risk for older adults in their daily living environments, not just in clinical settings. His system combines wearable sensors with explainable artificial intelligence to provide accurate, real-time measurements of key factors like walking patterns, balance, and leg strength.

鈥淏y making fall risk monitoring more accessible, continuous, and easy to understand, this research has the potential to significantly improve the health, mobility, and quality of life of older adults,鈥� he says. 鈥淭his award strengthens my commitment to advancing human-centered, trustworthy healthcare technologies and to inspiring the next generation of engineers and researchers.鈥�

Linqing Li鈥檚 CAREER award will advance his work in hydrogels, sponge-like materials that can hold a lot of water and can be used for chronic wound healing, tissue regeneration, and as a model to study cancer invasions. His goal is to develop a simpler, more efficient way to create structured hydrogels using a sugar-based material system and a natural process called liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) 鈥� 鈥渁 phenomenon similar to how oil and vinegar separate in salad dressing,鈥� he says.

鈥淯nlike current methods, this new process avoids harmful chemicals, simplifies production, and supports the creation of more complex hydrogel designs,鈥� Linqing adds. In addition, he will train students and researchers on these methods, which combine principals of chemical engineering and bioengineering, to develop innovative materials for applications such as medicine and tissue repair.

Many ecological monitoring programs are limited by practical limitations such as budget cycles and

personnel constraints. With his CAREER grant, Easton White will investigate how to best design long-term ecological monitoring programs that provide robust data for informing conservation and management decisions. The project will also invest heavily in training, supporting student researchers and producing an open-source software toolkit and interactive web application to help scientists and managers at other field stations and universities implement effective monitoring programs.

鈥淭his award is deeply meaningful as it combines my passion for mentoring and teaching with my research expertise under a single umbrella,鈥� says White. 鈥淎s someone who studies complex ecological systems and mentors the next generation of scientists, I often see the disconnect between data collection in the field and the analytical skills needed to make sense of that data. This project gives us the chance to close that gap.鈥�

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