UCLA Materials Scientist Aaswath Raman Awarded DARPA Fellowship

Associate professor Aaswath Raman of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering has received the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director’s Fellowship Award. 

A highly selective award given to top performers among DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) recipients, the fellowship will extend Raman’s 2021 Young Faculty Award, which included a $500,000 grant over two years, for an additional year and $250,000 in funding.

The DARPA YFA and Director’s Fellowship Award were established to encourage early-career scientists to pursue high-risk, high-reward research that could result in breakthrough technologies that address national security challenges. 

Raman’s project focuses on developing a new solid-state cooling technology, known as electroluminescent cooling, based on light-emitting diodes. This approach could yield highly compact and efficient cooling devices, particularly suited to cryogenic applications including infrared sensors and detectors. Through a range of electronic materials and device advances, along with nanophotonic strategies, Raman and his team will use the additional year of funding to build on their progress and demonstrate proof of concept cooling devices. 

Since joining UCLA in 2018, Raman has received numerous awards, including the Materials Research Society Kavli Foundation Early Career Award, the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the NSF CAREER, the DARPA Young Faculty Award and the Sloan Research Fellowship. In 2022, he was also elected a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors.