The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award 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.
Department of Physics
Associate professor of physics, Priya R. Banerjee, PhD, is an experimental biophysicist whose research group employs innovative microscopy and single-molecule spectroscopy tools to understand the physical principles, properties, and functions of biomolecules. He is an expert on intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), an intriguing class of proteins that lack a rigid structure but play decisive roles in cellular physiology and pathology. Banerjee has received numerous recognitions including an outstanding young investigator award from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of General Medical Sciences and a young faculty award from the Biopolymers in Vivo subgroup of the Biophysical Society. In 2023, he received a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his project, “Dissecting Phase Behavior of Pioneer Transcription Factor Condensates and Their Role in Gene Regulation.”
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
An assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Mingchen Gao, PhD, is an emerging scholar in big healthcare data, medical imaging informatics, computer vision and machine learning. Prior to UB, Gao was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Science at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. Gao was awarded a 2023 National Science Foundation CAREER Award to build transferable deep learning models and provide better tools for medical imaging diagnosis. Machine learning has advanced medical imaging analysis leading to improved early detection and diagnosis of disease in an environment where quality databases are available. Gao’s project seeks to improve medical imaging and care by expanding the use of learning model-enabled medical imaging analysis more broadly.
Department of Materials Design and Innovation
Prathima Nalam, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Materials Design and Innovation. Nalam’s research focuses on advancing alternative materials that will leave a low-carbon footprint on the environment. Her research interests lie in developing next-generation materials in the fields of tribology, filtration, and bioengineering. To achieve this, she employs advanced materials characterization methods, novel functionalization techniques and, if required, couples with machine learning methods to establish structure-property relationships for novel materials such as 2D materials and biomaterials. Nalam is the recipient of the Swiss National Science Foundation Fellowship and the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers Early Career Award. In 2023, she received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in support of her work to develop efficient, low-pollutant machine lubricants.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
An expert in data mining and knowledge discovery and recipient of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ Early Career Researcher of the Year award, Erdem Sariyuce, PhD, focuses his research on graph mining, seeking to enable improved mining on real-world networks by bridging data mining, data management and high-performance computing. Sariyuce received a 2023 National Science Foundation CAREER Award to create motif-based models and algorithms to analyze and process temporal networks, which include interactions that are only active at a certain point in time such as communication networks (e.g., email and phone calls) and financial transactions. This work has important implications for a variety of areas including cybersecurity, economics, and social media analysis.
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Sangwoo Shin, PhD, investigates diverse problems in the areas of complex fluids, interfacial processes, and transport phenomena in biological and environmental systems. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed journal papers and registered over 10 national/international patents, from which he co-founded Phoresis, Inc., a start-up company that advances low-cost, energy-efficient, and sustainable water treatment technologies. In 2023, Shin was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his project “Phoretic Transport of Membrane-Bound Biological Colloids in Complex Environments,” which has important, high-impact biomedical and environmental applications, including drug delivery and wastewater treatment.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Ziming Zhao, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and director of the CyberspACe securiTy and forensIcs Lab (CactiLab). The recipient of numerous best paper awards, Zhao’s research focuses on hardware-assisted security, system security, usable security, and cybercrime analysis. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Defense, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Security Agency’s National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity program. In 2023, Zhao received an NSF CAREER Award to support his research in improving cybersecurity in networked and embedded internet of things systems through designing more trustworthy and deployable trusted execution environments.
