Three CU-Boulder engineering faculty win prestigious CAREER awards

Abbie Liel

Matthew Hallowell

Mahmoud Hussein

Three University of Colorado Boulder engineering faculty were selected this spring to receive National Science Foundation CAREER awards.

Assistant professors Abbie Liel and Matthew Hallowell of civil, environmental and architectural engineering, and Mahmoud Hussein of aerospace engineering sciences, were selected to receive the awards.

The NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program, or CAREER, provides one of the nation’s most prestigious honors for young faculty. The award, which comes with a five-year grant of about $400,000, helps establish the recipients’ integrated research and educational activities and addresses areas of important need.

“Receiving an NSF CAREER award is a strong indicator of the outstanding accomplishments of these junior faculty and the likely impact of their research on our society,” said Kurt Maute, associate dean for research in the College of Engineering and Applied Science. “I look forward to seeing their research programs flourish and their teaching and mentoring to further excel.”

Liel, who specializes in structural engineering and structural mechanics, plans to develop a multiscale methodology for assessing the reductions in seismic risk possible through building retrofit design and policy. Her emphasis on retrofit is motivated by the large number of older buildings that predate major changes to seismic code provisions and, as a result, are vulnerable to earthquake-induced damage.

Hallowell, who is part of the construction engineering and management group, is focusing on predictive modeling of construction injuries in complex environments. He will test the hypothesis that more than half of the variability in construction injury statistics can be explained by a few basic and inherent attributes of construction environments.

Hussein, who specializes in structural and material systems, will investigate the nonlinear, dissipative mechanics of phononic materials, providing formulations and analytical tools to investigate their application to acoustic/vibration control, blast protection, radio frequency sensing, acoustic imaging, digital signal processing, energy conversion and other areas.

For more information on CU-Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science visit http://www.colorado.edu/engineering.