Three Argonne Researchers Awarded DOE Early Career Award

Three researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have earned the department’s 2018 Early Career Research Program Award.

Argonne's (left to right) Prasanna Balaprakash, Karen Mulfort, and Zhang Jiang are among the 84 scientists who received the US Department of Energy's 2018 Early Career Research Program awards. Courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory.

Computer scientist Prasanna Balaprakash, physicist Zhang Jiang, and chemist Karen Mulfort are among the 84 scientists chosen to receive this honor. The awards, designed to bolster the nation's scientific workforce, provide support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early career years, when many scientists do their most formative work.

Balaprakash strives to develop scalable machine learning methods that can effectively learn in complex scientific domains that have limited training data. This work will push the limitations of existing machine learning methods in an effort to advance data-driven scientific discovery by leveraging scientific domain knowledge and supercomputers.

Jiang's work in Argonne's X-Ray Science division will support research to better control the synthesis and fabrication of advanced materials, which is a challenge because of their complexity and heterogeneity. Possible applications for the technique include the study of materials used in energy-related devices and photonics.

Mulfort seeks to understand the effect of the environment on the way molecules interact with light and with each other. More specifically, her work will examine molecular interactions taking place within confined nanostructures.

Recipients were chosen among a competitive pool of candidates from DOE national laboratories and U.S. universities nationwide. Selections were made based on rigorous peer review from outside scientific experts. Each awardee from Argonne will receive $500,000 or more per year for five years to advance their research.

The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies and universities, and from federal, state, and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems.