Supported the next generation of faculty

Arizona State University is among the top three universities in the nation for the total number of DARPA Young Faculty Awards, alongside Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Michigan. Fueling ASU’s success, the Global Security Initiative launched the DARPA Working Group in 2015 to help junior ASU faculty members pursue the career-boosting DARPA awards. The Young Faculty Award program provides high-impact funding to rising academics in early-career research positions at U.S. institutions to advance innovative research enabling transformative Department of Defense capabilities.

Here are eight next-generation academic scientists, engineers and mathematicians recognized by DARPA with the prestigious award.

Jennifer Kitchen

Military radios operate at low frequencies, which have the advantage of operating over longer distances and the disadvantage of equipment that is bulky, requires large antennas and drains battery quickly.

Kitchen, an associate professor of electrical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, aims to integrate recent innovations in electronics architecture and processes to bring military radios down in size and up in efficiency and resiliency, without losing the benefits of low-frequency systems. The system would enable transmissions to be even more secure, and maybe even capable of stealth communications.

“The dream is to do all of that with something the size of a cell phone,” Kitchen said.

Mahyar Eftekhar

Eftekhar, an associate professor of supply chain management at the W. P. Carey School of Business, conducts research that could radically improve the nation’s approach to disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. His work concentrates on nonprofit operations management and humanitarian logistics. Through more coordinated disaster relief operations, humanitarian organizations and government entities could share resources to effectively and efficiently respond to disasters.

While his main goal is to improve the resilience of the humanitarian supply chain in response to rapidonset disasters, he believes the results of his work could be adapted to many other nonprofit sectors.

Umit Ogras

Ogras, an adjunct faculty member with the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, aims to provide low-cost devices powered by external energy sources like heat, as well as tools that can sense and transmit data without wires. They are made by printing tiny electrical circuits on small, flexible polymer platforms on which commercially available computer processing chips can be mounted.

Those technologies are being designed to enable realtime analysis of an array of situations in areas of active national defense operations.

Such tools could help commanders evaluate the physical conditions and performance of personnel in the field, monitor the operability of safety-critical equipment and provide a virtual picture of a range of activities occurring across broad expanses of terrain.

Sze Zheng Yong

Yong, a visiting scholar, faculty and researcher with the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, is an expert in system dynamics and control as well as robotics. His research focuses on understanding the intention of autonomous swarms controlled by another party, such as an enemy.

“My proposed ideas are rather different from conventional approaches, and the to-be-developed techniques will generally be applicable to a wide array of dynamic systems beyond swarm systems,” he said. “The swarm intent understanding problem has many potential defense applications.”

“My proposed ideas are rather different from conventional approaches, and the to-be-developed techniques will generally be applicable to a wide array of dynamic systems beyond swarm systems,” he said. “The swarm intent understanding problem has many potential defense applications.”

Yan Shoshitaishvili

Today’s alarming growth in cybercrime is exacerbated by a lacking cybersecurity workforce. There are an estimated 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs worldwide, around 750,000 of which are in the U.S.

Shoshitaishvili, an associate professor in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, champions multiple projects at ASU to improve the nation’s cybersecurity.

Among his efforts, he plans to fill the jobs pipeline with a well-qualified, dedicated cybersecurity workforce that can beat the hackers at their game. He serves as associate director of workforce development at ASU’s Center for Cybersecurity and Trusted Foundations, or CTF. Fueled by a DARPA grant, the CTF team has established the American Cybersecurity Education (ACE) Institute.

Timothy Balmer

An assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences, Balmer investigates how sensory signals are processed by the brain with a focus on hearing and balance.

Balmer’s lab prioritizes disorders like Meniere’s disease, an ear condition that causes imbalance and vertigo. This disorder may also cause tinnitus, a hearing condition that causes a ringing or buzzing noise in the ear. Balmer's research is personal to him, as he suffers from tinnitus himself.

His lab studies the vestibular cerebellum, a sensory system in the brain integrating signals that convey head, body and eye movements to coordinate balance. A disruption in the neural processing of this system causes conditions like Meniere’s disease.

Saeed Zeinolabedinzadeh

For Zeinolabedinzadeh, an assistant professor in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, a DARPA Young Faculty Award propelled his research to develop a new, high-precision, low latency and cost effective time transfer scheme to improve 5G, 6G, wireless sensor networks, navigation and defense applications.

“Our proposed approach significantly increases the synchronization accuracy and reduces the synchronization time,” Zeinolabedinzadeh said. “In addition, the system can robustly operate while the radios within a communication system are moving at high speed, such as a user in the 5G network.”

Such improvements would enhance the performance and reliability of wireless systems used for national security as well as other communications applications.

Yu Yao

Yao, an associate professor in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, has developed a new imaging sensor for applications where understanding the properties of light is essential, such as autonomous driving, biomedical imaging and quality control in manufacturing. Her DARPA Young Faculty Award has funded her exploration of this technology’s potential for underwater navigation.

The sensor she developed not only can capture regular images but also collects detailed information about the light itself. All this technology is built directly onto a small chip, an integration that makes the device compact, portable and potentially cheaper to manufacture and operate.

“The design concept for this microscale polarization imaging sensor was inspired by the eye of the mantis shrimp, which can see the polarization difference of light,” Yao said.