Gordon and Narra awarded NSF CAREER awards

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Hamish Gordon, assistant professor of chemical engineering, and Sneha Prabha Narra, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The CAREER award is a five-year grant awarded to junior and early-career faculty to support their research and to help them serve as academic role models. It supports activities that integrate education and research as well as develops foundations for leadership.

Gordon’s atmospheric science research explores the impact of air pollution and particulate matter on clouds and climate. By developing weather prediction and climate models, Gordon and his team are able to simulate areas of interest to study atmospheric properties.

With this award, Gordon will examine the role of organic molecules emitted by trees in the formation of atmospheric particles, or aerosols. Currently, aerosol formation and growth is not well characterized by the majority of Earth system models, but Gordon is hoping to change that.

When cloud droplets take shape in the atmosphere, they form around a particle. The more polluted a cloud, the more droplets it contains. While clouds with more particles typically have a cooling effect because of their reflective properties, certain particles, like black carbon aerosols, can absorb sunlight, causing the clouds to heat up and potentially evaporate. This leads to a warming effect, limiting the amount of sunlight reflected back into space.

Updated new particle formation mechanisms will help improve existing models and better predict the droplet concentration, or number of droplets in a fixed volume in clouds. Gordon’s models will look at pre-industrial cloud droplet concentrations by simulating Earth’s atmosphere in 1850. A key aim of his work is to improve the understanding of how these concentrations have changed between pre-industrial times and the present-day.

This award will also help train the next generation of atmospheric scientists by developing an after-school program that allows high school students in the Pittsburgh region to gain hands-on experience in field measurements and data analysis.

“This NSF funding will hopefully enable my group to understand better than ever before how atmospheric particle concentrations over land could have changed since pre-industrial times,” Gordon said. “This is important because these particles affect how much of the Sun’s radiation the Earth reflects back to space.”

Narra studies additive manufacturing—or, as it is more commonly known, 3D printing—with applications in aerospace, automobile and energy industries. She and her lab, Engineering Materials for Transformative Technologies (EMIT), work on understanding and controlling the process-structure-property relationships in metal additive manufacturing to create adaptable, high-quality parts with improved performance and consistency.

This award supports the EMIT Lab’s efforts to design novel processing pathways to prescribe desired thermal history in the part and tailor properties during powder bed fusion additive manufacturing. Specifically, they will look to understand the effects of power field control on porosity and microstructure, including solidification and solid-state transformations, and evaluate the effectiveness of power field control in decoupling thermal history from part geometry.

Throughout the manufacturing process, if temperature does not change at appropriate times and in appropriate amounts, the material’s microstructure and properties can be affected. The current inability to track and control this impedes additive manufacturing’s wider adoption into industrial applications.

The award will also help to train the existing manufacturing workforce, advance graduate and undergraduate education, and extend outreach to K–12 students.

“I’m grateful for this NSF CAREER support, which will help us tackle a critical challenge in additive manufacturing to achieve consistent part quality irrespective of geometry. This can ultimately benefit qualification and certification of additively manufactured parts for end-use applications,” said Narra. “Our work builds on the contributions of many students, collaborators, and colleagues, who have shaped my thinking. Like many researchers, my path has included both setbacks and breakthroughs, including previously rejected proposals that ultimately helped me home in on a compelling research problem. I’m excited that this research direction resonated with the expert review panel at NSF.”