Nov 22, 2019 | No Comments | By Michelle Pagano
Congratulations to HEMI Fellow and Department of Mechanical Engineering assistant professor Ryan Hurley, who has been chosen by the National Science Foundation for its prestigious CAREER Award!
The CAREER Award, which recognizes the highest level of excellence in early-stage researchers, is one of the NSF’s most competitive awards and emphasizes high-quality research and novel education initiatives. It provides funding so that young investigators have the opportunity to focus more intently on furthering their research careers.
The five-year grant will support Hurley’s project, “Quantifying Local Rearrangements and Their Effects in 3D Granular Materials.” Through this project, Hurley plans to explore and address the hypothesis that certain features of local particle rearrangements can quantitatively describe the behavior of 3D granular materials. With the data yielded from this research, Hurley hopes to overcome prior challenges with validating and developing theories and laws involving such materials, and thus broaden the field’s basic understanding of the topic. Additionally, the educational activities through this grant will provide opportunities for a Ph.D. student, undergraduate summer students, and high-school students from groups under-represented in STEM to train and develop skills in the field.
Hurley received his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2011. He then went on to the California Institute of Technology, completing a master’s degree and Ph.D. program in applied mechanics in 2012 and 2015, respectively. Prior to joining the Whiting School of Engineering faculty in 2017, Hurley held an appointment as an assistant research professor at Johns Hopkins while finishing postdoctoral studies in computational geosciences at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Congrats again, Prof. Hurley!
Click here to learn more about Prof. Hurley’s research >>
