Illinois researchers receive Air Force Young Investigator Awards

Engineering at Illinois was well-represented with several successful proposals to be funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). This year, AFOSR will award approximately $16.6 million in grants to 57 scientists and engineers from 42 research institutions and small businesses who submitted winning research proposals through the Air Force's Young Investigator Research Program (YIP).

Proposals from Engineering at Illinois faculty include:

• Phillip Ansell, Department of Aerospace Engineering
  The Onset of Dynamic Stall: Understanding Flowfield Unsteadiness to Enable Closed-Loop Control
• Gaurav Bahl, Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering
  Chip-Scale Linear Non-Reciprocal Optomechanical Systems
• Alex Olshevsky, Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering
  Reliable Multi-Agent Control in Failure-Prone Environments via Inhomogeneous Markov Chains
• Marco Panesi, Department of Aerospace Engineering
  A Reduced-order Modeling Approach to Enable Kinetic Simulations of Non-equilibrium Hypersonic Flows
• Robert Pilawa, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
  Series-Stacked Computer Architectures—Leveraging Multi-Core Systems for Extreme Miniaturization of Mobile Computing Platforms

The YIP is open to scientists and engineers at research institutions across the United States who received PhD or equivalent degrees in the last five years and who show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research. The objective of this program is to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities for the young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and the related challenges in science and engineering.

This year, AFOSR received more than 200 proposals in response to the AFOSR broad agency announcement solicitation in major areas of interest to the Air Force. These areas include: Dynamical Systems and Control, Quantum and Non-Equilibrium Processes, Information, Decision and Complex Networks, Complex Materials and Devices, and Energy, Power and Propulsion.