Jan 14, 2015 | No Comments | By Michelle Pagano
Professor Jaafar El-Awady, HEMI faculty member and assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been selected by the National Science Foundation to receive 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 El-Awady’s research, “Identifying the Micro-mechanisms Leading to Hydrogen-Induced Intergranular Fracture in Metals”. The aim of this research is to develop microstructurally based computational methods to fundamentally identify the effect of hydrogen on the deformation and fracture of metals used in energy generation, conversion or storage systems. This research will also contribute to engineering practice via advances in the structural integrity of energy systems. The education and outreach tasks through this grant will contribute to efforts aiming to improve STEM achievement in Baltimore elementary public schools with a high minority student population.
As founder of the Computational and Experimental Materials Engineering Laboratory at the Whiting School, El-Awady’s goal is to enhance the field of “materials by design” by moving from empirical, trial-and-error development techniques to a combination of state-of-the-art multi-scale computational methods and experimental techniques that streamline the process of developing reliable materials with superior performance.
El-Awady completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Cairo University in Egypt, then earned his doctoral degree also in Aerospace Engineering from the University of California, Los Angles (UCLA). Prior to joining Johns Hopkins University in 2010, Dr. El-Awady spent two years as a visiting scientist at the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory.
