2024 NSF CAREER Awards

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Electrical and Computer Engineering Assistant Professors Giulia Fanti, Guannan Qu, and Akshitha Sriraman the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, a prestigious five-year grant given to junior faculty for research and education.

Fanti’s research focuses on systems that enable cooperation in limited-trust environments, with applications to some of the most pressing problems facing society today (e.g., cybercrime, financial inclusion, and climate change). A major technical challenge in her work stems from its inherently multidisciplinary nature, drawing on distributed systems, networking, machine learning, security, privacy, and information theory.

Qu’s research aims to develop theories that make machine learning applicable in real-world large scale engineering systems. With an interdisciplinary focus, Qu is establishing new mathematical tools in machine/reinforcement learning, control theory, optimization, and network science and applies these tools to cyber-physical systems, power systems, transportation systems, and robotics.

Sriraman’s research bridges computer architecture and software systems, with a focus on making hyperscale data center systems more efficient, sustainable, and equitable via solutions that span the systems stack. Her work has developed the software and hardware foundations of hyperscale data center systems that support modern web services, such as web search, video streaming, and online healthcare.

The CAREER Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards 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. Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.