Jones and Nakahira receive NSF CAREER awards

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Trevor Jones, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Yorie Nakahira, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. A prestigious five-year grant given to junior faculty who show promise of being leaders in their field, the NSF CAREER award supports the integration of research and education.

Jones’ research is inspired by understanding the physics of everyday objects to inform and develop new technologies. At CMU, Jones heads the Mechanically Intelligent Engineered Structures (MInEnS) Laboratory. Reimagining natural phenomena and human expression as tools to build and design materials, his research traverses multiple applications, including soft robotics, wearable technologies, and morphing structures.

With this award, Jones will explore the mechanical properties of beadwork as a new class of programmable metamaterial. Beadwork, a diverse art with cultural significance, comprises weaving thread through beads to form structures typically used for decorative applications. This patterning not only makes beadwork visually stunning but gives rise to emergent mechanical properties with potential functional applications. Beadwork combines the complementary mechanics of granular matter, an ensemble of macroscopic particles that has the potential to resist high loads, with the flexible, woven fibers of textiles, thereby positioning this metamaterial as both flexible and durable.

With the aim of using beadwork as a material to advance national health through development of soft robotics and wearable technologies, Jones’ work will investigate the interwoven relationship between beadwork design and its mechanical properties. This work will characterize beadwork’s mechanical response to nonlinear deformation, internal contact, and friction to develop predictive models for beadwork’s physics.

This award will also help support the next generation of STEAM researchers by establishing a graduate course on craft mechanics and offering K-12 STEM programming using beadwork.

“As a kid, I remember playing with beadwork headbands my mom made. The patterns and combinations of color would catch my eye, and the tactile feel once I picked them up made them impossible to put down. As I’ve grown to do mechanics research, when my mom crafted my daughter a beadwork embroidered vest, I was reminded of how mechanically fascinating beadwork is,” Jones said. “For these experiences to culminate in recognition from the National Science Foundation to research beadwork as a novel material platform is an honor to my heritage as an Ojibwe scholar.”

Nakahira’s research sits at the intersection of neuroscience, cell biology, cloud computing, and autonomous systems, as she applies the fundamental theory of optimization, control, and learning to these fields. She studies how theoretical foundations and computational tools can be used to enhance the stability and efficiency of autonomous systems and devices.

These autonomous devices, like the ones found in cars or robots, operate with little to no human intervention and are becoming increasingly utilized in today’s world. But to achieve efficiency, such devices must be equipped with real-time learning and control algorithms in order to actively respond to their internal and external environments.

With this award, Nakahira will develop techniques that mitigate against various risks in autonomous systems that operate in an uncontrolled environment. To design safer, more human-aligned autonomous control systems, Nakahira will quantify long-term risks and develop efficient control techniques that offer long-term assurance against human-perceived risks. Her research will also develop real-time control strategies that adapt their level of caution based on inferred human preferences, providing strong safety guarantees without sacrificing performance.

In addition, she will study how repeated interactions—such as those between autonomous systems and human users, or among multiple devices—can lead to unintended consequences like adversarial or unstable behavior. By modeling these dynamics and designing policies that anticipate and prevent such outcomes, her work will help ensure that autonomous systems remain trustworthy and cooperative over time.

The research supported by this award will also extend to classes and seminars as well as K-12 classrooms. A virtual game will be developed to help students gain a better understanding of key control system concepts.

“As a whole, this award will help us design high-performing, safer, and more human-aligned autonomous control systems,” Nakahira said. “I am very excited and grateful to receive this award.”