Seven scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are recipients of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science Early Career Research Program (ECRP) award.
Steven Blazewicz, Kostas Kravvaris, Shusen Liu, Filippo Scotti, Jennifer Shusterman, Kyle Wendt and Ben Zhu are among 91 awardees receiving the recognition under the program.
"Investing in cutting-edge research and science is a cornerstone of DOE's mission and essential to maintaining America's role as a global innovation leader," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. "The Biden-Harris administration is funding scientists and researchers at our nation's national labs and universities, early in their careers, ensuring they have the resources to expand scientific discovery and pursue solutions to some of the most complex questions."
The Early Career Research Program is designed to bolster the nation's scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during crucial early-career years, when many scientists do their most formative work.
Steven Blazewicz
Blazewicz, who has been at the Lab for nine years, is a microbial ecologist and biogeochemist who specializes in characterizing active microbes in soil to better understand their roles in carbon storage, nutrient cycling and broader environmental cycles.
His award is funded by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research with a focus of systems biology enabled microbiome research to facilitate predictions of interactions and behavior in the environment.
"I'm thrilled and honored to receive a DOE ECRP award," Blazewicz said. "It's a significant recognition of the work I've been doing to better understand the critical role of microbial populations in soil biogeochemical cycles, particularly carbon cycling. This grant gives me the opportunity to push the boundaries of my research, allowing me to explore in even greater depth how microorganisms drive essential ecosystem processes. The support that comes with this award not only helps advance scientific knowledge but also contributes to real-world solutions, like improving soil management and addressing climate change."
Microbial activities play a crucial role in controlling Earth's biogeochemical cycles by breaking down organic matter, recycling nutrients and regulating the flow of essential elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, which helps sustain life on the planet. To investigate these dynamics, "I use a combination of stable isotope probing, molecular biology techniques, chemical and physical characterizations and process measurements," Blazewicz said. "My goal is to expand our predictive capabilities by uncovering the microbial mechanisms and interactions that drive important ecological and biogeochemical processes in soil."
The funding will primarily support the high-throughput analyses and experiments necessary to study how diverse carbon compounds affect microbial growth and mortality in soil ecosystems.
"Ultimately, this funding will allow me to generate insights into microbial contributions to carbon storage and soil health, which could help inform future strategies for climate change mitigation," Blazewicz said.
Kostas Kravvaris
Kravvaris is a staff scientist in the Nuclear Data and Theory group in the Nuclear and Chemical Sciences Division of the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate (PLS). His work focuses on nuclear theory.
"It is a great honor to receive this award," Kravvaris said. "It really showcases the great science that is possible only at a place like LLNL, where intersectional research can take place seamlessly."
Kravvaris, who has worked at LLNL for six years, plans to use his award money to pursue research on first-principle nuclear theory that aims to improve our understanding of light-ion reactions and the emergence of collective phenomena in atomic nuclei. He also will use some of the funding for working with undergraduate and graduate students over the summer, "which I am really looking forward to doing," he said.
Shusen Liu
Liu is a computer scientist in the Machine Intelligence Group in Computation's Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) Division. His work focuses on understanding and interpreting the inner mechanisms of neural networks and integrating human domain knowledge with machine capabilities to advance scientific discovery.
"I feel very fortunate to receive this recognition and funding, which will allow me to continue developing the research agenda I have been pursuing at LLNL," he said. "My work here focuses on the intersection of human-computer interaction and fundamental machine learning research."
After joining the lab as a postdoc in 2017, Liu advanced to a staff scientist in 2019. With his award he plans to delve deeper into uncovering how concepts and other human-understandable structures are organized and represented in neural networks.
"By leveraging this understanding, we can facilitate machine-human knowledge exchanges at various granularities and for different audiences," Liu said. "The proposed research is expected to yield long-term impacts in AI-driven discovery, the development of scientific foundation models and AI safety."
Filippo Scotti
Research scientist Scotti joined the Lab in 2014 and is on permanent assignment at General Atomics where he works on developing and operating spectroscopic diagnostics to study the properties of edge and divertor plasma in the DIII-D tokamak.
"The early career award is a great honor and opportunity to advance my research and increase the scientific output of planned upgrades at the DIII-D facility," Scotti said.
He was selected for the award in Fusion Energy Sciences - Advanced and Long Pulse Tokamak Research.
With the award, Scotti hopes to develop new ultraviolet and visible spectroscopy and ultraviolet spectroscopic imaging diagnostics for the characterization of radiative divertor scenarios in the DIII-D tokamak via the determination of impurity densities and radiation front dynamics for a range of existing and proposed divertor geometries. The funding also will support graduate students and a postdoctoral researcher for edge transport simulations benchmarked on the DIII-D tokamak. Scotti is a member of the LLNL Collaboration on theDIII-D team, which started in the 1980s.
Jennifer Shusterman
Nuclear and Chemical Sciences Division staff scientist Shusterman specializes in radiochemical separations with applications in nuclear forensics, isotope production and fundamental nuclear data measurements.
"I am honored to have received this award and excited to do the research," she said.
Shusterman joined LLNL as a graduate student intern in 2013, returning as a postdoc in 2016 in the Nuclear and Radiochemistry Group. She left in 2018 for academia, returning to LLNL as a staff scientist in 2021 and was awarded the ECRP by the DOE Office of Isotope R&D and Production in the focus area of targetry and isotope production research.
Her award will support investigation into the use of additive manufacturing, with a focus on multi-element feedstocks, for fabrication of targets for nuclear reactions. The application of this approach avoids full target dissolution after irradiation, reducing radiochemical separation times and/or increasing specific activity of the final product. Advances in targetry for nuclear reactions supports isotope production directly and the end users of isotope products which includes nuclear medicine, forensics and physics amongst others.
Kyle Wendt
Kyle Wendt is a staff scientist in the Nuclear Data and Theory Group within the Nuclear and Chemical Science Division of PLS. His research looks into predicting the properties of atomic nuclei, the building blocks of the visible matter in our universe, with a recent focus on how to apply novel computing architectures, such as quantum computers, to simulations of atomic nuclei.
"I am extremely excited and honored," Wendt said. "The ECRP represents both the broader community and the DOE science programs recognizing you as a leader in your field. This five-year grant will enable me to pursue ideas that don't typically fit within the typical 2-3 year timeframe of most science funding, giving me the incredible opportunity to pursue novel big ideas."
Wendt joined LLNL in October 2016 as a Lawrence Fellow and converted to staff in 2019. With his award, he will develop novel quantum computing algorithms for simulating nuclear dynamics.
By treating a quantum computer as a programmable analog simulator, he will use noisy quantum devices that are available now and over the next decade to perform realistic simulations of nuclear reactions.
"Such simulations are immensely difficult with traditional high-performance computing," Wendt said. "For anything other than the lightest nuclei [smaller than around an oxygen nucleus] we are forced to use harsh approximations that have limited applicability to short-lived isotopes. Quantum computers will let us avoid these approximations and predict reaction properties for atomic nuclei that are too difficult to measure in a lab. The algorithm I am developing essentially programs the quantum computer to directly simulate the nuclear experiment in a clean environment."
Ben Zhu
Zhu, a research scientist in the Physics Division of PLS, works on advancing edge physics and modeling toward fusion pilot plants.
"I was thrilled when I found out the result," Zhu said. "It is an honor to receive this award, especially as our theory and modeling group's first recipient in the Lab's Fusion Sciences program. I am grateful to my mentors and colleagues in and outside the Lab. I learned a lot from them in the past years, and I certainly couldn't get this award without their help."
Zhu joined LLNL in 2018 as a postdoc and advanced to a staff scientist in 2020. With support from DOE ECRP for the next five years, he plans to concentrate a large portion of his effort on further developing advanced numerical models of magnetic fusion devices, "studying the complex yet fascinating fusion boundary plasma physics, and hopefully finding alternative solutions for plasma exhaust management, a critical R&D challenge to harness fusion energy."
ECRP awards to an institution of higher education are approximately $875,000 over five years and the minimum request for awards to a DOE national laboratory or Office of Science user facility are approximately $2,750,000 over five years.
Since its inception in 2010, the Early Career Research Program has made 961 awards, with 631 awards to university researchers and 330 awards to national lab researchers.
To be eligible for the DOE award, a researcher must be an untenured, tenure-track assistant or associate professor at a U.S. academic institution or a full-time employee at a DOE national laboratory, who received a Ph.D. within the past 12 years. Research topics are required to fall within one of the Department's Office of Science's eight major program offices:
- Accelerator R&D and Production
- Advanced Scientific Computing Research
- Basic Energy Sciences
- Biological and Environmental Research
- Fusion Energy Sciences
- High Energy Physics
- Nuclear Physics
- Isotope R&D and Production
Awardees were selected from a large pool of university- and national laboratory-based applicants. Selection was based on peer review by outside scientific experts.
