4 UMD Researchers Receive White House Honor
Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers Recognizes Exceptional Potential
Four UMD faculty members recently received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on up-and-coming researchers.
Photo by Stephanie S. Cordle
Four University of Maryland researchers are among nearly 400 scientists and engineers nationwide honored earlier this month by outgoing President Joe Biden for their exceptional potential for leadership and novel research undertaken early in their scientific careers.
Damena Agonafer, Clark Faculty Fellow and associate professor of mechanical engineering, Zohreh Davoudi, associate professor of physics, Soheil Feizi, associate professor of computer science with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), and Justyna Zwolak, a National Institute of Standards and Technology mathematician working in several areas on the UMD campus, received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on up-and-coming researchers.
Agonafer
Agonafer’s award recognizes his research on the fundamental limits of evaporative cooling for high-powered electronic systems, with applications that range from data centers to electric vehicles.
He pursues a wide range of research at the intersection of engineering, energy, and sustainability, including as a faculty affiliate of the A. James Clark School of Engineering’s Center for Risk and Reliability and the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute. He is also UMD site lead for the new multi-institutional Environmentally Applied Refrigerant Technology Hub, a $26 million, National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded center focused on reining in the environmental costs of refrigeration technologies.
“It’s humbling to be recognized by the White House for the contributions I’ve been able to make in the area of heat transfer and thermal management,” Agonafer said. “In addition to the research itself, I’ve been able to undertake significant education and outreach efforts through my NSF CAREER Award, including programs aimed at providing educational opportunities to underrepresented students.”
Davoudi
Davoudi, an associate professor with the Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics, researches strongly interacting quantum systems and investigates how elementary particles like quarks and gluons come together and form the matter that makes up our world.
Her work to understand the foundations of matter includes developing theoretical frameworks and applying cutting-edge tools like quantum simulation to studying problems in nuclear and high-energy physics. Ultimately, she hopes to describe the evolution of matter into steady states that occurred in the early universe and that happens at a smaller scale in the aftermath of high-energy particle collisions, like those in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.
She is a fellow in the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS) and associate director for education at the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation.
“I am truly honored by this recognition,” Davoudi said. “I am excited to continue exploring the frontiers of nuclear physics and quantum information science using advanced classical- and quantum-computational methods and to continue building a community of amazing junior and senior collaborators who share the same or similar goals.”
Feizi
Feizi is a renowned expert in the field of reliable and trustworthy artificial intelligence, a core faculty member in the University of Maryland Center for Machine Learning, the driving force for establishing the Rising Stars in Machine Learning program, and active in the Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS), where he collaborates with other faculty on projects like investigating text-to-image generative AI models like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and Midjourney.
Feizi contributed to the House Bipartisan Task Force on Artificial Intelligence's report, which released its findings in December. He also recently founded and is the CEO of RELAI, a company whose mission is to make AI reliability accessible and achievable for everyone.
“I’m truly honored by this recognition and am grateful to my amazing students, colleagues and mentors who made this possible,” Feizi said. “I look forward to building on this momentum to continue pushing the boundaries of AI and making it more trustworthy and impactful for everyone.”
Zwolak
Zwolak is an affiliate fellow in QuICS, with adjunct appointments in physics and UMIACS. She was recognized for research combining machine learning, computer vision and physics-based heuristics to calibrate and control quantum systems, with particular emphasis on enabling the scale-up of semiconductor quantum dot devices, a leading system for building quantum computers.
Zwolak has developed fundamental and applied advances at the intersection of machine learning and quantum information science, advancing the state-of-the-art in automating challenging quantum computing experiments as well as providing a new foundation for high-dimensional optimization problems. Her novel use of machine learning to automate the arduous process of tuning quantum dots so that they are usable as quantum computing bits (“qubits”) has enabled such devices to be seriously considered as candidates technologies for creating quantum computers, and also helped spawn a whole new subfield of physics focused on the automated control of precision experiments.
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