Grove School engineers win NSF CAREER Awards

Two Grove School engineers from The City College of New York are recipients of the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career (NSF CAREER) Award, which supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in integrating research and education and to lead advances in the missions of their department and organization.

NSF CAREER awards provide five years of funding to help lay the foundation for a faculty member’s future research. Dr. Ahmed Mohamed, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, will receive $500,000 and Dr. Robert J. Messinger, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, will receive $550,572 for their research proposals. Both are affiliated with the CUNY Energy Institute.

Mohamed’s proposal, entitled “A Hybrid Physics-Based/Data-Driven Modeling and Mitigation Approach for Interdependencies Between the Electric Power, ICT, and Transportation Critical Infrastructures,” will positively impact society by reducing the operational cost of infrastructures, decreasing the likelihood and impact of blackouts, and improve cities' responses to major disturbances. CUNY students and neighboring high schools will have the opportunity to participate in his research.

Messinger’s proposal, entitled “Design and Understanding up from the Atomic Scale of Multivalent Intercalation Electrodes for High-Energy-Density Rechargeable Batteries,” aims to establish and validate molecular-level design principles aimed at realizing next-generation aluminum-ion and zinc-ion battery electrodes, laying the scientific groundwork for researchers to develop high-energy-density, non-flammable rechargeable batteries composed of low-cost, earth abundant elements.

Among various educational activities, Messinger will establish two annual summer workshops: a “Battery Bootcamp” for New York high school chemistry teachers who would like to incorporate electrochemical energy storage into their curricula, as well as a “CUNY School of NMR” for graduate engineering and science students at The City University of New York (CUNY) who would like to integrate nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy into their research.

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