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Two faculty members in the University of Colorado Boulder鈥檚 College of Engineering and Applied Science have been honored with the National Science Foundation鈥檚 prestigious CAREER award.

The NSF Faculty Early Career Development, or CAREER, award supports junior faculty members who demonstrate excellence in research and who effectively integrate their research with education. CU-Boulder鈥檚 recent recipients are Prashant Nagpal, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, and Franck Vernerey, an assistant professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering.

Nagpal is being awarded $499,077 over five years to work on improving the amount of energy from the sun that photovoltaic panels can convert into electricity. Nagpal鈥檚 work focuses on using 鈥渉ot carriers鈥� in quantum-confined semiconductor nanostructures to capture the waste energy that cannot be captured by the bulk semiconductors used in today鈥檚 solar panels.

Nagpal also will investigate if semiconductor nanostructures can be used as photocatalysts to split water, creating clean hydrogen fuel, or to generate other hydrocarbon solar fuels using carbon dioxide, water and sunlight in an artificial photosynthetic process.

Vernerey is being awarded $400,000 over five years to develop mathematical models that can predict and control the regeneration of damaged tissues from a patient鈥檚 own cells in a hydrogel scaffolding.

Vernerey鈥檚 work could eventually enable personalized medicine by introducing a new generation of algorithms that can learn from the behavior of specific cell populations and predict the type of scaffolding that will lead to successful tissue regeneration. In the long term, this strategy could provide an alternative to tissue or organ transplants.

Contact:
Prashant Nagpal, 303-735-6732
Prashant.Nagpal@colorado.edu
Franck Vernerey, 303-492-7165
Franck.Vernerey@colorado.edu
Laura Snider, CU media relations, 303-735-0528
Laura.Snider@colorado.edu