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

The research, led by Dr. Zhongqiu Lin together with Associate Professor Toshiki Sugimoto and colleagues, focused on anatase titanium dioxide, one of the most widely studied photocatalytic materials for hydrogen evolution. Although it has been recognized that interactions at the water-catalyst interface are key determinants of photocatalytic performance, systematic experimental studies that explicitly target the structure and reactivity of this interface have remained scarce. The central difficulty is a practical one: probing the molecular structure of interfacial water is challenging under normal circumstances, and it becomes even harder under the conditions where hydrogen is actually being evolved. Compounding the problem, the apparent hydrogen evolution activity measured in an experiment is highly sensitive not only to the surface area of the photocatalyst but also to the amount of water present at the interface, making it difficult to separate genuine differences in reactivity from simple differences in how much water is available to react.

To overcome these obstacles, the team designed a series of experiments using anatase TiO2 photocatalysts with different surface characteristics, allowing them to compare interfaces that interact with water in distinct ways. They combined infrared spectroscopy, which reveals the adsorption states and hydrogen-bonding arrangements of water molecules, with real-time mass spectrometry, which tracks the production of hydrogen gas as it happens. Crucially, the measurements were carried out under precisely controlled hydration conditions ranging from sub-monolayer coverages, where isolated water molecules dot the surface, to several molecular layers of adsorbed water. This control allowed the researchers to examine how water behaves in different interfacial environments while keeping the amount of water explicitly accounted for.

A key methodological advance came from the way the team analyzed their data. By normalizing the measured hydrogen formation rates with respect to both the specific surface area of the photocatalyst and the number of adsorbed water layers, they were able to quantitatively distinguish the intrinsic reactivity of interfacial water from effects that arise simply because different samples hold different amounts of water at their surfaces. This normalization framework meant that when two interfaces showed different hydrogen evolution rates, the difference could be attributed to the molecular structure of the water at those interfaces rather than to trivial differences in surface area or water loading. It is this careful separation of variables that gave the study its power to draw firm conclusions about structure-reactivity relationships.

With this framework in place, the researchers systematically investigated the adsorption state of interfacial water, examining both the strength with which water molecules bind to the TiO2 surface and the mode of adsorption, whether the molecules remain intact or dissociate into hydroxyl groups and protons upon adsorption. The conventional view in photocatalysis has held that strong water-TiO2 interactions should generally be favorable, because strong binding is thought to enhance the trapping of photogenerated charge carriers at the surface, suppress the recombination of electrons and holes, and thereby prolong the lifetimes of the charge carriers that are needed to drive the chemical reactions. Intuitively, longer-lived carriers should mean more opportunities for water molecules to be reduced or oxidized, and hence better catalytic performance.

The experimental results told a different story. Contrary to the conventional expectation, the team found that relatively weaker water-TiO2 interactions were associated with higher reactivity of the interfacial water toward hydrogen evolution. In other words, water molecules that were held less tightly to the surface were, on average, more reactive participants in the photocatalytic reaction than those bound strongly. This observation challenges the intuition that maximizing water-surface binding strength is a reliable design strategy, and it suggests that the factors governing interfacial reactivity are more subtle than charge-carrier dynamics alone.

The explanation, the researchers realized, lies in the fact that interfacial water does not exist as isolated molecules interacting only with the solid surface. Instead, water molecules at the interface also form hydrogen-bond networks with one another, and these networks possess collective structural and dynamical properties of their own. The team therefore turned their attention to how the hydrogen-bonding environment of the interfacial water influences its reactivity. Their analysis revealed that weaker and more flexible hydrogen-bond networks were associated with higher reactivity of the interfacial water. Water held in a rigid, strongly connected network was less reactive, while water embedded in a looser, more pliable network reacted more readily to produce hydrogen.

This finding provides molecular-level insight into what is believed to be the rate-determining step of photocatalytic hydrogen evolution: the initial oxidation of water, which proceeds through proton-coupled charge transfer at the water-TiO2 interface. In such a process, the transfer of a proton is coupled to the movement of electrical charge, and the reaction requires the surrounding molecular environment to reorganize as the reactants transform into products. From the perspective of Marcus theory, the foundational framework for describing electron transfer reactions, the rate of a reaction depends in part on the reorganization energy, that is, the energetic cost of rearranging the molecular environment to accommodate the charge transfer. Greater flexibility and larger fluctuations of the hydrogen-bond network reduce the barriers associated with this molecular reorganization, making it easier for the reaction to proceed. The experimentally observed higher reactivity of more flexible interfacial water is thus consistent with theoretical expectations, and it ties the macroscopic catalytic performance directly to the dynamics of the hydrogen-bond network at the interface.

The implications for photocatalyst design are significant. Because strong water-catalyst interactions have beneficial effects on photogenerated charge carriers, photocatalyst development has traditionally favored hydrophilic interfaces, where water binds strongly to the catalyst surface. The new study reveals, however, that relatively weaker water-TiO2 interactions, which are associated with more flexible hydrogen-bond networks, favor higher reactivity of the interfacial water toward hydrogen evolution. This suggests that the optimal interface is not the one that binds water most tightly, but the one that allows the interfacial water to retain enough structural freedom to undergo the molecular reorganization demanded by the reaction. Surface chemistries, coatings, or morphologies that moderate the strength of water binding while preserving charge-carrier performance could therefore offer a path to more active photocatalysts.

More broadly, the work demonstrates the value of directly characterizing both the adsorption state and the hydrogen-bonding structure of interfacial water and correlating these properties with hydrogen evolution activity under well-controlled conditions. By establishing a quantitative link between the molecular structure of the interface and its catalytic reactivity, the study provides a molecular basis for engineering water-catalyst interfaces to enhance photocatalytic performance. As the field continues to pursue efficient solar-to-chemical energy conversion, the message from the Institute for Molecular Science team is clear: to design better photocatalysts, researchers should look not only at the solid surface itself but also at the delicate, dynamic architecture of the water molecules that sit upon it, and consider giving those molecules a little more room to move.

Subject of Research: Structure and reactivity of interfacial water in photocatalytic hydrogen evolution on anatase TiO2

Article Title: Bridging interfacial water structure and reactivity in photocatalytic hydrogen evolution at TiO₂ interfaces

Article References: Bridging interfacial water structure and reactivity in photocatalytic hydrogen evolution at TiO₂ interfaces. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: photocatalysis, hydrogen evolution, titanium dioxide, interfacial water, hydrogen-bond network, infrared spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, anatase TiO2, solar fuels, water splitting, Marcus theory, charge transfer

The investigation focused on bulk formamidinium lead iodide films, which are a subtype of halide perovskites. What marks this study as especially significant is the fact that these films were produced through scalable solution-based or vapor-phase deposition techniques rather than the highly controlled, specialized growth methods typically employed in laboratories. Such scalability potentially opens the door to practical, affordable development of ultrafast photonic technologies on a commercial scale, circumventing the limitations that often hamper translation from bench to market.

Central to this discovery is the composite nanodomain superlattice structure intrinsic to these perovskite films. Unlike uniform crystals, these materials possess a spatially ordered array of alternating structural domains at the nanoscale. These domains form superlattice arrangements capable of inducing rapid radiative recombination through a mechanism attributed to quantum tunneling effects. The tunneling phenomena enable electron-hole pairs to recombine at unprecedented rates, manifesting in ultrafast transient photoluminescence signals within the material.

The research team, led by Professor Sam Stranks of the Optoelectronic Materials and Device Spectroscopy group, employed a combination of cutting-edge ultrafast spectroscopy techniques alongside advanced optical and electron microscopy characterization. This comprehensive methodological approach allowed them to pinpoint the nanodomain superlattices as the structural origin behind the extraordinary speed of light emission. Such synergy between spectroscopy and microscopy served to correlate the quantum temporal dynamics of the photoexcited carriers directly with the material’s nanostructural features.

One striking aspect of this study is the observation of quantum transients on the order of 2 picoseconds, a timeframe rarely accessible in bulk semiconductors. Conventional optoelectronic materials typically display slower radiative recombination processes due to larger exciton binding energies or less efficient carrier transport. The discovery that halide perovskites can overcome these limitations emphasizes their versatility and underlying quantum mechanical sophistication, pointing toward their potential utility in ultrafast light sources, optical switches, and even components for quantum communication systems.

While these results are exciting, it is crucial to note the conditions under which the experiments were conducted. The ultrafast quantum phenomena were recorded at cryogenic temperatures, which often enhances coherence times and suppresses phonon interactions that may otherwise degrade performance at ambient conditions. The study does not provide data on whether similar ultrafast behavior persists at room temperature, nor does it explore critical quantum-optical properties such as single-photon purity or indistinguishability. These factors are essential to evaluate the suitability of halide perovskites for quantum information applications.

Despite these current limitations, the scalable production methods and the intrinsic nanodomain architecture of formamidinium lead iodide films suggest that further optimization could extend these ultrafast quantum effects into practical operational regimes. The ability to fabricate large-area films with reproducible quantum properties is particularly promising for the development of next-generation photonic devices that demand both high-speed response and cost-effectiveness. Such devices could find applications in telecommunications, sensitive photodetectors, and integrated quantum circuits.

The research contributes significantly to the growing body of knowledge demonstrating that halide perovskites are not just confined to solar energy harvesting but harbor a wealth of multifaceted optoelectronic functionalities. Their structural tunability at the nanoscale facilitates a degree of quantum control previously unattainable in similarly processed materials. This intrinsic link between nanoscale structure and quantum emission marks a paradigm shift in how researchers might approach the design of advanced photonic materials.

Dr. Dengyang Guo, a post-doctoral fellow and joint first author of the paper, emphasized the practical implications of the findings: “Seeing these ultrafast effects in scalable films is exciting. It shows perovskites have even more to offer than we realised, beyond solar cell optimisation.” This insight echoes the broader scientific community’s growing recognition that halide perovskites could represent a platform technology, adaptable across various domains of photonics.

PhD student Tom Selby, who also contributed equally to the research, expressed enthusiasm over the structural-emission correlation: “Being able to trace the emission back to the structure has been an eye-opener – it is really exciting to consider the potential of what this research could lead to.” Such fundamental understanding paves the way for rational engineering of these materials to tailor ultrafast quantum responses for specific device applications.

Professor Sam Stranks summarized the broader vision behind the work: “Perovskites continue to surprise us. This discovery shows how their intriguing nanoscale structure gives rise to intrinsic quantum properties that could be harnessed for future photonic technologies.” These advances suggest that the perovskite family may well become a cornerstone of emerging quantum photonic devices, provided ongoing research overcomes challenges related to material stability and room-temperature operation.

In conclusion, this investigation into picosecond quantum transients within halide perovskite nanodomain superlattices highlights a frontier where materials science meets quantum photonics. By leveraging scalable fabrication routes and elucidating the fundamental mechanisms behind ultrafast emission, the study marks an essential step forward in the quest for highly efficient, low-cost quantum light sources and photonic components. The continued exploration of halide perovskites, at both the fundamental and applied levels, is poised to unlock exciting opportunities in both classical and quantum photonic device architectures.

Subject of Research: Quantum transients and ultrafast photonics in halide perovskite nanodomain superlattices

Article Title: Picosecond quantum transients in halide perovskite nanodomain superlattices

News Publication Date: 29-Oct-2025

Web References: 10.1038/s41565-025-02036-6

Keywords: Perovskites, semiconductors, renewable energy, solar energy, quantum transients, ultrafast photonics, nanodomain superlattices, quantum tunneling, radiative recombination, scalable materials, optoelectronics