The five recipients are Dr. Waseem Abbas, assistant professor of systems engineering; Dr. Sourav Dutta, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering; Dr. Kirill Lazebnik, assistant professor of mathematical sciences; Dr. Kyle McCall, assistant professor of materials science and engineering; and Dr. Xinda Wang, assistant professor of computer science. Four of the five, Abbas, Dutta, McCall and Wang, are members of the university’s Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, while Lazebnik belongs to the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. The portfolio of funded work illustrates how the CAREER mechanism can seed progress across the full stack of modern technology, from the atoms inside a transistor to the mathematical abstractions that describe dynamical behavior and the code that keeps the world’s software infrastructure safe.

University research leadership framed the awards as evidence of the institution’s growing strength in areas that will define the coming decades of technology. “From resilient networks and advanced semiconductors to artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and fundamental mathematics, these researchers are tackling complex challenges with the potential to shape the technologies and systems of the future,” said Dr. Joseph Pancrazio, vice president for research and innovation and professor of bioengineering. He emphasized that the awards also recognize the recipients’ commitment to integrating research and education, giving students the chance to learn through hands-on discovery and helping cultivate the next generation of researchers and innovators. That educational component is not incidental to the CAREER program; it is a core evaluation criterion, and each of the five UT Dallas projects embeds training, outreach or curriculum development alongside the technical work.

Dr. Waseem Abbas received a five-year award of $514,916 to confront one of the most consequential questions in networked engineering: what happens when a system designed to absorb disruption is hit by something worse. Robot teams, infrastructure networks and distributed computing systems, in which tasks are shared across many devices, are typically engineered with a certain tolerance for failure built in. If an attack, fault or environmental disturbance stays within that expected envelope, the system degrades gracefully. But when the disruption exceeds the threshold, performance can deteriorate rapidly and unpredictably, sometimes collapsing in ways that cascade through the entire network. Abbas aims to develop networked systems that adapt as conditions worsen, so that performance declines smoothly rather than failing catastrophically. A second strand of his research seeks to identify the most critical connections and components within a network, the nodes and links whose protection yields the greatest resilience. By concentrating defenses on those essential elements, operators could maintain core functions without paying for costly, blanket redundancy across every part of the system. The work has obvious implications for autonomous vehicle coordination, industrial automation and the distributed computing fabric that increasingly underpins everyday services.

Dr. Sourav Dutta’s award, totaling $501,234, targets the physical bottleneck that threatens to slow the artificial intelligence revolution: the semiconductor itself. As AI models and autonomous systems generate staggering volumes of data, conventional computer chips struggle to move information efficiently between the separate regions where data is stored, processed and transmitted. Every transfer across those internal distances costs energy and time, and at the scale of modern workloads the cost becomes prohibitive. Dutta will investigate ultrathin oxide semiconductor transistors with a property that could prove transformative: they can be manufactured at low temperatures and stacked vertically on top of conventional silicon electronics. Vertical stacking would shorten the distance data must travel, directly reducing energy consumption and potentially enabling faster, more efficient chips. Because the low-temperature fabrication process is compatible with existing silicon technology, the approach could be integrated with current manufacturing rather than requiring an entirely new industrial base. Dutta also plans to apply artificial intelligence and computational modeling to predict how candidate transistors will perform before they are built, accelerating design cycles and shrinking the optimization process that normally stretches across years of laboratory iteration.

On the software side of the engineering school, Dr. Xinda Wang received $617,397 to build AI tools that can help open-source software communities catch security vulnerabilities earlier, at the moment developers are making changes to code. Open-source software, assembled from publicly available code that anyone can inspect, contribute to or reuse, has become the invisible backbone of the digital world. It powers commercial products, government systems and critical infrastructure alike. That ubiquity carries a hidden risk: when a vulnerability exists in a widely used open-source component, it silently propagates into every downstream system that incorporates the original code, multiplying the potential blast radius of a single flaw. Wang’s team will train machine-learning systems to recognize patterns in how code changes are made and how those changes ripple through other parts of a software project, flagging suspicious modifications before they are merged and deployed. Just as importantly, the researchers will develop AI models capable of explaining why a particular change may pose a security risk. That explanatory capability matters because security teams and volunteer maintainers often operate with limited time and resources; a tool that simply raises an alarm without context is easily ignored, while one that articulates its reasoning can be trusted and acted upon.

The fourth engineering awardee, Dr. Kyle McCall, received the largest of the five grants, $796,646, to probe a question that sits at the frontier of materials science: how the local atomic structure of emerging semiconductor materials determines their properties and their potential in electronics and energy technologies. Many of the most promising new materials exhibit unusual behavior that arises from deviations of atoms away from their ideal, expected positions within the crystal lattice. These local structural distortions can dramatically alter how a material conducts, absorbs light or responds to electric fields, yet scientists do not fully understand how the deviations can be controlled through the composition and arrangement of the constituent atoms. Compounding the challenge, the distortions are invisible to conventional characterization techniques, which average over large regions and therefore miss the local disorder that matters most. McCall and his team will use total X-ray scattering, a technique sensitive to how atoms are locally bonded within a material, to map the relationship between chemical composition, atomic deviations and resulting properties. The ultimate goal is a set of design principles that researchers can use to create new semiconductor materials with desirable properties on demand. The project also carries an educational mission, providing undergraduates with hands-on research experience and developing educational resources for teachers and students across the Dallas-Fort Worth region.

The lone recipient in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Dr. Kirill Lazebnik, secured a $450,000 CAREER grant for work in pure mathematics with unusually broad applied reach. His research concerns rational functions, the mathematical objects formed as ratios of polynomials, which serve as fundamental tools for mathematicians, scientists and engineers who model and analyze complex systems. Rational functions appear throughout signal processing, dynamical systems and scientific computing, making advances in their theory potentially consequential far beyond mathematics departments. Lazebnik’s project aims to deepen understanding of the structure of the space of rational functions and to explore how these functions might be applied in additional areas of analysis and dynamics. Questions that sound abstract, such as how the space of such functions is organized and connected, often translate into practical insight for engineers studying stability, control and signal behavior. Like his colleagues, Lazebnik has built education into the heart of the grant, with undergraduate research opportunities and community outreach programs designed to train future mathematicians and widen access to the discipline.

Taken together, the five awards reveal a coherent picture of where foundational research investment is flowing and why. The problems the CAREER recipients have chosen sit precisely at the pressure points of contemporary technology: networks that must survive deliberate attack and random failure, chips that must move data without drowning in their own energy consumption, software supply chains that must be defended at the moment of change, materials whose properties are hidden in atomic-scale disorder, and mathematical structures that underpin our ability to model all of the above. Each project also treats education as an engineering problem in its own right, designing pipelines of trained students, teacher resources and community engagement that extend the impact of the research well beyond the laboratory. For UT Dallas, the sweep of the awards across two schools signals institutional momentum in fields where competition for federal support is fierce. For the researchers themselves, five years of stable funding at the start of an academic career is a rare luxury, the freedom to pursue ambitious, long-horizon questions, and to bring students along for the entire journey from first hypothesis to published result.

Subject of Research: 2026 NSF CAREER awards to five UT Dallas faculty supporting research on network resilience, oxide semiconductor transistors, open-source software security, atomic structure of semiconductor materials and rational functions.

Article Title: Technologies, math research get lift from CAREER awards

Article References: Technologies, math research get lift from CAREER awards. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: NSF CAREER awards, University of Texas at Dallas, network resilience, oxide semiconductor transistors, open-source software security, artificial intelligence, semiconductor materials, total X-ray scattering, rational functions, systems engineering, materials science, mathematical sciences

Joseph Clark, an assistant professor in chemistry, is pioneering a novel approach to drug molecule tracking using tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope. Typically, pharmaceutical metabolism studies rely heavily on carbon-14, a radioactive isotope crucial for tracing how drugs are processed in living organisms. This methodology is essential to understanding drug efficacy and safety. However, the limited global supply of carbon-14, predominantly produced in a single facility in Russia, is now jeopardized by geopolitical instability following Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. This supply disruption threatens the pipeline of new therapeutics awaiting regulatory approval in the United States and Europe.

Clark’s research explores the potential of tritium to serve as a viable alternative radiolabel. Unlike carbon-14, tritium has a unique placement on the outer edges of molecules, which historically has complicated its use due to metabolic instability and susceptibility to oxidative degradation. Clark’s work will delve deeply into strategic tritium incorporation sites less vulnerable to these metabolic pathways. Moreover, his team will develop sophisticated analytical techniques to verify the molecular purity and structural integrity of these tritiated drug candidates. By establishing tritium as a reliable radiolabel, they aim to alleviate dependency on carbon-14, thereby safeguarding drug discovery processes from geopolitical supply chain disruptions and accelerating the production of new medications.

Concurrent with these advances in drug tracing, Doowon Kim, an assistant professor of computer science, is addressing an enduring menace in digital security: phishing attacks. Despite decades of research and mitigative efforts, phishing remains a persistent, evolving threat characterized by the creation of counterfeit websites designed to steal sensitive user information such as login credentials and financial data. Traditionally, defense mechanisms rely on comparing suspicious websites against verified legitimate ones—a resource-intensive and reactionary process that introduces critical delays in countermeasure deployment.

Kim’s groundbreaking project takes a fundamentally different approach, shifting focus towards detecting phishing websites through their underlying JavaScript code rather than their surface appearance. By analyzing these back-end scripts, Kim aims to fingerprint inherent structural features unique to phishing sites, enabling earlier identification and containment. Additionally, his team plans to integrate large language models to autonomously adapt to novel phishing strategies, significantly reducing reliance on human intervention. This proactive methodology promises to revolutionize phishing defenses, making detection faster, more accurate, and less resource-intensive, thus enhancing cybersecurity resilience across diverse platforms.

Meanwhile, at the intersection of physics and quantum technology, Joon Sue Lee, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, is leveraging the exotic properties of elemental tin to explore quantum phase behaviors with profound implications for quantum computing. Tin exists in two distinct phases: alpha and beta. Alpha-tin is known for its intriguing topological characteristics, a property that endows materials with robust, symmetry-protected conducting states, while beta-tin exhibits conventional superconductivity, capable of zero-resistance current flow under specific conditions. Understanding and harnessing the interplay between these two phases is pivotal to unlocking new quantum functionalities.

Lee’s research aims to fabricate ultra-pure films of both alpha and beta tin on the same chip, cultivating atomically sharp interfaces between the phases. This precise control over phase boundaries is critical, as mixed-phase or poorly defined interfaces have thus far hindered comprehensive studies of the coupled quantum phenomena. By achieving this level of material refinement, Lee hopes to generate novel heterostructures that deepen insights into how topological effects coexist with superconductivity. This knowledge could pave the way for innovative quantum devices that transcend current technological limitations, providing practical breakthroughs in quantum information processing and quantum computing architectures.

Together, these three projects address pressing challenges from fundamental scientific, technological, and societal perspectives, reflecting the multifaceted impact of modern research. The CAREER awards, which include substantial funding allocations—$650,000 for Clark, $597,000 for Kim, and $749,000 for Lee—empower these early-career scholars to accelerate their work over the coming years. The University of Tennessee’s commitment to fostering such talent is expressed through dual support: promoting cutting-edge discovery while nurturing educational opportunities that inspire students at every academic level to engage with the sciences.

Clark emphasized the need to transition tritium into the mainstream radiotracer for metabolic studies, noting the United States produces tritium for research and government use, complemented by suppliers in North America and Europe. His optimism lies in creating a sustainable, independent framework for radiolabeling that can withstand geopolitical uncertainties and supply chain vulnerabilities. Such a shift may enable the pharmaceutical industry to streamline metabolite tracking, reduce costs, and facilitate faster drug approval timelines, ultimately benefiting patients worldwide.

Kim’s approach is equally transformative in the cybersecurity domain, where the agility of attackers often outpaces traditional defenses. By focusing on the intrinsic properties of malicious code rather than superficial traits, his method promises automated, scalable phishing identification. The incorporation of advanced machine learning models to anticipate emergent attack vectors further elevates this defensive strategy, potentially defining a new standard in cyber defense systems that combine efficiency with adaptability.

Lee’s vision extends beyond academic inquiry; creating phase-pure films with atomically controlled interfaces might offer tangible pathways toward constructing quantum materials with bespoke properties. These materials could lead to quantum computing components less prone to decoherence and operational errors, two major hurdles in realizing practical quantum processors. His research not only contributes foundational quantum physics knowledge but also aligns with national interests in maintaining leadership in emerging quantum technologies.

Collectively, these achievements underscore the vital interplay between basic scientific research and its applications. From addressing a critical materials shortage affecting drug safety testing, to pioneering cybersecurity tools that safeguard digital infrastructure, to exploring materials at the quantum frontier, these Tennessee scholars exemplify the promise of early-career researchers in shaping a safer, healthier, and more technologically advanced future. As the University of Tennessee continues to cultivate such talent, their work stands as a beacon, encouraging the next generation of scientists to delve deeply into complex problems with creativity and tenacity.

Deb Crawford, vice chancellor for research, innovation, and economic development at the University of Tennessee, expressed profound pride in this year’s NSF CAREER award recipients. She highlighted the transformative potential of their research and its capacity to inspire both current students and future scientific leaders. Their interdisciplinary endeavors resonate beyond academia, embodying tangible solutions that address global challenges. This recognition not only validates their past achievements but also empowers their ongoing commitment to impactful scientific exploration.

In sum, these NSF CAREER awards awarded to Joseph Clark, Doowon Kim, and Joon Sue Lee signify more than individual accomplishments; they represent a strategic investment in innovative research fields critical to public health, cybersecurity, and quantum science. Each recipient embodies the ethos of early-career scientists who push boundaries and envision new paradigms. Their breakthrough work promises to deliver enhanced drug development methodologies, fortified digital defenses, and quantum materials innovations that collectively propel science and society forward.

Subject of Research: Pharmaceutical radiolabeling using tritium, phishing website detection via JavaScript and machine learning, and phase-pure quantum materials fabrication for quantum computing applications.
Article Title: University of Tennessee Researchers Awarded NSF CAREER Grants to Advance Drug Design, Cybersecurity, and Quantum Technologies
News Publication Date: Not specified
Image Credits: University of Tennessee
Keywords: Research impact, drug design, cybersecurity, quantum computing