A record nine Husker researchers earned National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program awards in 2024, for a total of $6.2 million in CAREER funding. This milestone places the University of Nebraska-Lincoln among the nation’s most successful institutions in earning awards through this prestigious program for rising scholars. Nebraska was one of only 25 academic institutions to receive nine or more CAREER awards in 2024, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Understanding the civil justice gap
Many people with housing, health care or employment disputes don’t receive the legal help they need.
Often, they don’t ask for it, compromising their safety, housing, and physical and mental health.
With a $660,000 CAREER award, Ashley Votruba, assistant professor of psychology, aims to better understand why people don’t seek assistance for their civil legal problems. People of color and those with lower incomes are least likely to request legal help, a significant reason for a gap in civil justice.
Votruba is conducting national surveys to illuminate how people across a wide demographic range perceive the legal system and manage civil justice problems. She will identify and follow some cases through resolution. This detailed look will help inform effective policies.
The project uniquely explores the gap in civil justice through a psychological lens rather than from a legal or sociological viewpoint.
“As a psychologist, I’m interested in things at the level of the individual,” said Votruba, a member of the university’s Law-Psychology Program. “By really focusing on the parties involved, we’re going to get a better ground-level understanding of the issue.”
To further address access to justice, she’s launching a community workshop program in Nebraska that engages university students in community outreach, among other strategies.
Exploring terahertz solutions
As wireless technologies proliferate, so does the demand for broadband connectivity.
To meet the growing need, Shuai Nie, assistant professor of computing, is using an $813,000 CAREER award to unlock the terahertz frequency range, a lesser-trafficked portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Opening access to an underused communication band will help not only ameliorate spectrum scarcity, but also boost connectivity in rural areas, where internet access is especially sparse.
Unlike radio waves used today, terahertz waves travel short distances and are easily scattered when they encounter obstacles. Nie’s previous research suggested methods to increase travel distances.
To test her theories, she’s establishing the Midwest’s first testbed to measure and test terahertz-frequency networks, which are expected to be a key component of sixth-generation wireless technology, or 6G.
Testing in agricultural settings is vital. Precision agriculture and smart farming require real-time, reliable access to data. To build operable networks, researchers must understand the factors that interrupt wireless communications on a farm, such as extreme weather and obstacles.
Nie and her team are conducting the first rural terahertz network experiments at the Spidercam Field Phenotyping Facility, part of the Eastern Nebraska Research, Extension and Education Center.
She’s also expanding her partnership with Girls Code Lincoln to support girls in rural areas.
Improving engineering education
Despite the need for engineers, half of the nation’s engineering majors leave the field before graduation.
Many students lack the strong spatial skills required in engineering classes. Women and members of lower socioeconomic groups, in particular, lag in their ability to manipulate, organize and make sense of spatial relationships, known as visuo-spatial skills.
Research shows these skills are less important in engineering careers than classes suggest.
With a $650,000 CAREER award, Grace Panther, assistant professor of engineering education, is developing teaching methods that deemphasize visuo-spatial skills.
“The end goal is creating methods of teaching that, regardless of your spatial skills, you can still be successful,” Panther said. “The presentation of content shouldn’t rely so heavily on a single skill.”
She’s exploring tools and strategies successful students with varying levels of visuo-spatial skills use to navigate civil engineering courses. Next, she’ll bring instructors and students together to co-develop course activities that incorporate a broader range of skills.
Enabling students with a wide range of visuo-spatial skills to succeed will help diversify the engineering profession, which is key to designing solutions for all people and to solving society’s big problems, Panther said.
Fortifying grain bin resilience
When a big city bridge or building collapses, headlines trumpet the economic and social havoc. But structural failures in rural areas can also cause regional, even national, upheaval.
The ubiquitous grain bin may seem inconsequential, but losing even one can cost $250,000 in grain loss, a loss insurance rarely covers.
With a $615,000 CAREER award, Christine Wittich, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, is subjecting steel grain bins to simulated natural disasters to better understand what brings them down. Her research could lead to upgrading construction standards.
Strengthening grain bins and other rural infrastructure will improve community resilience, support the nation’s agricultural economy and help protect national and global food security.
Wittich’s interest was piqued in 2020 when the most damaging series of thunderstorms in American history hit Iowa, causing $11 billion in damage and destroying 57 million bushels of stored grain.
To better understand grain bin vulnerability, Wittich and her team use numerical modeling and large-scale experiments, among other measures. The team is testing bins against Florida International University’s Wall of Wind and on Nebraska’s Scott Engineering Center’s seismic shake table.
Wittich is also creating opportunities for citizens to contribute research data following disasters and outreach programs to encourage rural students to pursue engineering careers.
Exploring semiconductor material properties
As photovoltaic technology – converting light into energy – expands, metal halide perovskites are emerging as a low-cost, highly efficient semiconducting material used to make it happen.
Despite perovskites’ growing use, scientists lack a fundamental understanding of their properties.
Yinsheng Guo, assistant professor of chemistry, seeks answers with a nearly $650,000 CAREER award. His work could lead to developing new materials and applications in solar energy, solid-state lighting, lasers, photodetectors and more.
The broadly defined perovskite family is known for its superconducting and ferroelectric properties. The ability of metal halide perovskites, or MHPs, in particular, to absorb and emit photons of light has drawn interest as an alternative to silicon because they’re less expensive and easier to scale.
Their exceptional performance is surprising given they’re prone to defects, said Guo.
He and his team are working to quantify and control MHPs’ unique structural dynamics to better understand their electronic properties so they can be further developed and commercialized.
Ultimately, a better understanding of MHPs’ design principles could be useful in developing other emerging materials.
Guo also seeks to transform physical chemistry education. He’s harnessing readily available computational resources to break down barriers and improve learning through active, experiential learning.
Advancing work toward bio-inspired robots
Robots that mimic animals and other organisms would benefit from the adaptability and efficiency nature has refined over millions of years.
To bring bio-inspired robots to life, scientists must learn how to match the softness and functionality of biological tissue.
Husker engineer Eric Markvicka is using a $690,000 CAREER award to develop a manufacturing approach to create a novel class of materials that could propel the fields of soft robotics, stretchable electronics and more.
It would be the first manufacturing strategy to yield stable mixtures of liquid metals enhanced by a wide range of solid particle additives.
The new liquid metal composites have significant commercial potential. Their properties – including thermal and electrical conductivity, fluidity and the capacity for self-repair – would surpass products currently available.
The composites could be used in 3D printing and would accelerate momentum toward 4D printing, which produces machines able to morph to adapt to different environments.
New materials for hybrid 4D printing would allow creating robotics and machines that mimic biological organisms, said Markvicka, Robert F. and Myrna L. Krohn Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering.
He’s also advancing engineering education by emphasizing business aspects alongside the technical. Additionally, he’s partnering with Nebraska’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research to develop a mobile science lab on manufacturing for Nebraska school students.
Investigating soil health over time
The Great Plains’ thick, dark topsoil helps farmers grow high-yielding crops. These same traits, however, impede research contributing to food security and climate change resiliency.
With an $845,000 CAREER award, Nebraska soil scientist Judith Turk is digging in to better understand topsoil degradation. Her work will improve current soil maps, help elucidate soil’s ability to store carbon and inform soil management strategies, among other critical issues.
“The thick topsoil in the Great Plains masks the effect of gradual degradation until it reaches an advanced stage,” said Turk, associate professor in the School of Natural Resources.
She’s comparing older soil data to data collected using modern methods of soil structure analysis, enabling her to gauge how Great Plains’ soils have changed over decades.
Turk’s research uniquely explores human-driven soil change below the surface. She suspects human impacts affect water flow through the subsoils, a major factor in soil health and carbon storage ability.
Additionally, Turk is introducing teaching strategies that pair soil science with stories of people on the land to deepen students’ learning through emotional engagement.
She’s also partnering with the Lincoln Community Learning Centers, which provide academic programming in underserved areas, to develop an outreach program for school students that infuses soil science with art and technology.
Developing batteryless smart devices
Smart devices are transforming society: tracking our health, measuring soil moisture, ringing home doorbells. They have – as most users can tell you – a major limitation: Batteries.
The limited lifespan of batteries powering many devices increases maintenance and replacement costs. And, only about 5% of batteries are recycled, an often-overlooked environmental cost.
Engineer Arman Roohi is using a $680,000 CAREER award to eliminate smart devices’ dependence on batteries. He also seeks to enhance their sensor intelligence and reduce their reliance on cloud computing.
Roohi is envisioning the next generation Internet of Things – an umbrella term for the billions of smart devices connected to the internet – minus the batteries.
He’s designing a hardware-software system that reliably harvests energy from the environment to power novel machine learning algorithms. Harnessing energy from ambient sources, such as sunlight, motion or temperature gradients, is possible. Each, however, suffers from unpredictable power availability.
Roohi’s system will be able to handle fluctuating power levels and ensure uninterrupted operation.
He’s also working to give internet-connected devices computational and decision-making capabilities rather than outsourcing those functions to other servers, which contributes to communication delays and security breaches.
Smarter sensors will enable devices to help train AI models locally, enabling faster, more efficient machine learning.
Broadening accessibility of communication tools for children
Though roughly 97 million people worldwide have disabilities that require alternative communication devices, many do not have the motor abilities and spelling skills needed to use existing assistive tools.
Kevin Pitt, assistant professor of special education and communication disorders, is using a $585,000 CAREER award to reimagine how brain-computer interface communication devices can best help children with severe disabilities.
BCI systems create a direct link between the brain’s electrical activity and an external device, which allows users to control a device and communicate with their thoughts.
Many existing BCI devices require users to touch a screen or look at letters and words – abilities that some children lack. With Pitt’s tool, children would view real-life pictures rather than letters.
The researchers will also allow study participants to create their ideal screen display. This will help lay the groundwork for a device based on children’s preferences.
“We’re really looking at what the brain signal does, and what kids prefer,” Pitt said. “We want to observe how the brain signal changes when we use real-life pictures and highlight items on the screen the way children prefer versus ways that we think they want.”
The project will also provide Husker students with hands-on BCI experience, ensuring that tomorrow’s frontline professionals are equipped to use the newest devices.