The Department of Defense (DoD) has announced its 2022 class of Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellows (VBFF) – made up of nine distinguished faculty scientists and engineers – to advance transformative, university-based fundamental research.
The 2022 fellows will join the approximately 50 current fellows who conduct basic research in areas of importance to the DoD, including materials science, cognitive neuroscience, quantum information sciences, and applied mathematics. Each fellow will receive up to $3 million over the five-year fellowship term to pursue cutting-edge fundamental research projects.
Additionally, fellows can engage directly with the DoD enterprise to collaborate with Pentagon laboratories and share insights with DoD leadership and the broader national security community.
“The [VBFF] is the Department’s most prestigious research grant award,” said Dr. Jean-Luc Cambier, the VBFF Program Director, in a statement. “It’s oriented towards bold and ambitious ‘blue sky’ research that will lead to extraordinary outcomes that may revolutionize entire disciplines, create entirely new fields, or disrupt accepted theories and perspectives.”
The VBFF is a highly competitive fellowship named in honor of Dr. Vannevar Bush, who directed the Office of Scientific Research and Development after World War II. The fellowship is sponsored by the Basic Research Office within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.
Some of the research projects include:
- “The Next Generation of Operator Regression Networks: Theory, Algorithms, Applications” by George Karniadakis from Brown University;
- “Data-Driven Acceleration and Discovery of Computational Models” by Andrew Stuart from the California Institute of Technology;
- “Scalable Generation and Control of Large Quantum States of Light and Matter in Engineered Semiconductor Materials” by Jelena Vuckovic from Stanford University;
- “Quantum System Scaling and Advantage for Fundamental and Applied Science” by Jun Ye from the University of Colorado; and
- “Dissecting the Neural Circuit Basis for Volition: A New Framework for Brain-Machine Interface” by Mark Schnitzer from Stanford University.
