AEM spotlight:
Ryan Elliott receives NSF CAREER award
| Ryan S. Elliott is an Assistant Professor on the Solid Mechanics faculty in AEM |
Ryan Elliott, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics (AEM), has been awarded a 5-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant to develop new tools for the identification of “active materials” that could be incorporated into a new generation of sensors and actuators. The grant is part of Program Manager Dr. Shih-Chi Liu’s “Sensor Innovation and Systems” program in the NSF Directorate for Engineering under the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI).
NSF established the CAREER program, its most prestigious award for junior faculty members, in 1994 in recognition of the critical roles played by faculty members in integrating research and education, and in fostering the natural connections between the processes of learning and discovery. This premier program emphasizes the importance the NSF places on the early development of academic careers dedicated to stimulating the discovery process in which the excitement of research is enhanced by inspired teaching and enthusiastic learning.
Education and a commitment to advanced research is at the core of AEM’s mission, and Professor Elliott looks to further that mission through his research on active materials.
Active materials, like the shape memory alloys used to make vascular stents, are playing an ever-increasing role in the design of new sensors, actuators, and “smart” structures. Elliott’s research seeks to model new sensor materials and to systematically map out their active behavior.
“I’m excited and honored to receive a NSF CAREER grant,” Elliott said. “The research supported by this grant will study the basic mechanisms that give shape memory alloys the ability to remember their shape. I believe that the computational methods we plan to develop will provide a fresh perspective on the fundamental principles governing the behavior of active materials.”
In addition to the creation of new modeling and computational methodologies, Elliott’s NSF-funded research will provide individual training for graduate and undergraduate students and will incorporate research results into the courses he teaches at The University of Minnesota.
Elliott will create a website that will make the results of his work broadly accessible and will encourage the development of new interactions and collaborations between his and other research groups interested in similar problems.
To learn more about Professor Ryan Elliott’s research, visit his AEM biography page
Last Modified: Wednesday, 02-Jan-2008 05:55:14 CST -- this is in International Standard Date and Time Notation