Megan Reiter, Mark Torres and Yonglong Xie, assistant professors in Rice’s Wiess School of Natural Sciences, have received 2024 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Awards.
NSF CAREER Awards include five-year grants to support early-career faculty who “have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.” About 500 CAREER Awards are given each year across all disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences and engineering.
Reiter, who joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2022, studies star and planet formation in regions of space rich in dust and gas. Her CAREER research will investigate how the brightest and most massive stars in these regions influence the formation of planets around smaller stars nearby.
Read more about Reiter’s CAREER Award.
Torres joined the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences in 2017. His CAREER project will develop innovative approaches to analyze variations in river water chemistry. To better understand the effects of climate change on water resources, his lab will investigate how long it takes water to flow through river watersheds and how quickly the water’s chemistry changes as it flows.
Read more about Torres’ CAREER Award.
Xie joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2023. His CAREER research aims to harness quantum objects known as magnons that occur in magnetic materials. Xie’s lab will explore the collective behavior of magnons using graphene in strong magnetic fields, with an eye toward creating synthetic matter and developing next-generation quantum devices and sensors.
Read more about Xie’s CAREER Award.