Mathieu Bauchy, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the agency’s highest honor for faculty members in the early part of their careers. The award includes a five-year, $500,000 grant to support his research and teaching in the field of glass science.
Bauchy, a computational materials scientist, leads the PARISlab, which stands for “Physics of AmoRphous and Inorganic Solids Laboratory,” at UCLA. The group focuses on understanding the atomic structures and associated properties of disordered solids — a class of materials such as glasses and concrete. The team uses complex computational simulations and machine learning in their research.
This NSF grant will support using a branch of mathematics — network topology — to explore the atomic structure of glasses composed of chalcogen elements, which include germanium, antimony, selenium and tellurium. Such glasses could be used in new types of 3-D computer memory that could store more than 10 times the information than that of currently used materials, and increase data-transfer speeds by up to 1,000 times.
In addition to this grant, Bauchy has been the principal investigator on five other NSF grants, including a $1.5 million award for making 3-D printed concrete that uses carbon dioxide to enhance the material’s strength.
Bauchy joined UCLA in 2014 as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor earlier this month. He is also a member of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management.