Five Yale faculty receive Air Force Research Laboratory Young Investigator Awards

Five Yale Assistant Professors received Air Force Research Laboratory Young Investigator awards. Recipients from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences are Charles Brown, Assistant Professor of Physics; Allison Didychuk, Assistant Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry; and Tianyu Zhu, Assistant Professor of Chemistry. Award recipients from the School of Engineering & Applied Science are Yu Hu, Assistant Professor of Applied Physics and of Physics, and Marynel Vazquez, Assistant Professor of Computer Science,

Brown, Didychuk, He, Vazquez, and Zhu are among 48 recipients selected for funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the basic research arm of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). AFOSR/AFRL has awarded a total of approximately $21.5 million in grants for their 2024 Young Investigator Program (YIP).  YIP recipients receive three-year grants of up to $450,000 to support research in science and engineering and projects that further the mission of the Department of the Air Force.

Below is a list of the award-winning projects.

Charles Brown

Assistant Professor of Physics

Project title: "Exploring Exotic Transport Properties of Quasicrystals Using Ultracold Atoms in an Optical Decagonal Quasicrystal Lattice."

Allison Didychuk

Assistant Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry

Project title: "New strategies for visualizing a powerful molecular motor."

Yu He

Assistant Professor of Applied Physics and of Physics

Project title: "Understanding and tuning magnetism in correlated metals."

Marynel Vazquez

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Project title: "Towards Robots that Reason About Fairness: Effects on Trust."

Tianyu Zhu

Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Project title: "Many‐Body Quantum Chemistry Framework for Catalysis on Metallic Surfaces."