Materials Scientist Aaswath Raman Receives National Science Foundation CAREER Award

Aaswath Raman, assistant professor of materials science and 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 stages of their teaching and research careers. 

The award includes a five-year, $500,000 grant to support Raman’s research to enable the dynamic control of thermal radiation – the heat that objects give off as electromagnetic waves. Findings from this research could help improve infrared imaging and sensing technologies, and create materials that better direct and control the flow of heat in energy applications. The grant will also support educational and outreach activities related to the research.

Raman focuses on how to control light and heat using nanoscale and microscale materials. Working from a multidisciplinary computational and experimental perspective, his laboratory designs, creates and studies metamaterials and photonic devices that can shape, absorb and emit light in highly unusual but advantageous ways over a broad range of wavelengths. His group connects these advancements to solid-state and electronic devices to enable new functionalities. His group has also built on these capabilities to demonstrate new clean energy technologies that can both reduce carbon emissions and allow our built environment to better adapt to a warming planet.

Raman has received several other honors reserved for researchers in the early stages of their careers, including a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award in 2021, a Hellman Fellowship in 2020 and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2019. Earlier this year, he was elected as a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors.