Nebraska ties CAREER award record
Nine Husker researchers earned National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program awards, tying an institutional record set in 2024. Nebraska’s 2025 CAREER awards, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for rising scholars, totaled $6.9 million.
Understanding zinc’s role in taste
Zinc helps you enjoy your favorite foods. While doctors have prescribed the mineral to treat the loss of taste for decades, understanding its role in human taste has eluded researchers.
With a $1.5 million CAREER award, Nebraska’s Sunil Sukumaran is using new tools in molecular genetics to uncover how zinc affects our sense of taste.
Better understanding these mechanisms could lead to new treatments for people who lose their sense of taste, which can result from injury, infection, chemotherapy and aging.
Zinc also inhibits perception of sweetness. Greater insight could reduce sugar overconsumption, a leading cause of obesity and other metabolic diseases.
Sukumaran is also investigating zinc’s numerous additional roles in immunity, metabolism and cell regeneration in sensory tissues, including taste, olfactory and intestinal epithelial cells.
“The mechanisms of how zinc governs taste are very complicated,” said Sukumaran, assistant professor of nutrition and health sciences. “We have new tools available now that didn’t exist five or 10 years ago.”
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Investigating how evictions affect children
About 3 million American children face eviction each year. Yet little is known about the long-term economic and social toll it takes on their lives.
Nebraska economist Daniel Tannenbaum is exploring the cost of eviction on children’s outcomes with a nearly $431,000 CAREER award. His research could inform new policies aimed at tackling housing instability nationwide.
To answer critical questions about eviction’s long-term costs as well as effective prevention measures, Tannenbaum is working with eviction data in several American cities and creating newly linked datasets.
The research will draw on Nebraska’s Central Plains Federal Statistical Research Data Center to link court data to restricted census data.
“Eviction court records do not contain information beyond the court case. Understanding the impact of eviction on households requires building new datasets that follow individuals after the court process is over,” said Tannenbaum, Georgia Lord Thompson and Jim Thompson Chair in Business and associate professor of economics.
His research will help determine, for example, the effect of evictions on school performance, later earnings, incarcerations, homelessness and other outcomes.
Ultimately, Tannenbaum’s research could lead to changes in the eviction process, such as giving tenants more time to move, and inform policies, such as emergency rental assistance and homelessness diversion programs.
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Studying rain-on-snow flood risks
Floods that occur from rain falling on snow are one of the most pressing unsolved problems in hydrology. As Nebraskans know too well, it’s one Huskers are well positioned to tackle.
With a nearly $675,000 CAREER award, Nebraska engineer Tirthankar Roy leads an investigation into the flood risk posed by rain-on-snow events.
His research could lead to better flood mitigation measures.
The phenomenon is familiar to Midwesterners: When significant snowpack covers the ground, rainfall and rising temperature can induce rapid snowmelt.
“This often leads to exceptional runoff, causing flooding and destruction in the communities impacted,” said Roy, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. The last widespread event in Nebraska contributed to historic flooding in 2019.
Roy and his team are assessing rain-on-snow flood risk in the Midwest, using machine learning and other methods to better understand contributing factors, their characteristics and how they vary in space and time.
The researchers will develop resources for community leaders based on their results. Roy expects the findings to set a benchmark for assessments elsewhere.
“[Rain-on-snow] floods are not thoroughly considered in mainstream water resources-related decision-making,” he said. “We want to bridge that gap through this comprehensive assessment and the associated outreach activities.”
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Smoothing academic, emotional transitions for third-grade students
Children make several well-known transitions along their educational journeys. A less recognized but equally pivotal point is entering third grade.
A lack of research and awareness leaves some students unsupported during this challenging time.
In a first, Husker developmental psychologist Jenna Finch is researching the forces shaping the third-grade transition with a nearly $930,000 CAREER award. Her findings will pinpoint targets for future intervention programs.
Third grade ushers in higher behavioral expectations, high-stakes standardized testing and difficult math concepts. It’s also when some kids start to tune out.
“Often, people try to re-engage with disengaged students in middle and high school,” said Finch, assistant professor of psychology. “Can we prevent that? Can we catch them before they begin to disengage from school and provide them with support?”
Finch’s multi-method study explores how children’s self-regulation skills are tied to math achievement and attitudes, and how classroom experiences in math instruction change from second to third grade. She’s focusing on math to support long-term success in STEM learning.
In partnership with Lincoln Public Schools, Finch will conduct her work in high-poverty schools, where resource deficits often magnify academic struggles.
Finch and her team are also developing educational materials to support parents and educators.
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Seeking a paradigm shift in wireless communications
With wireless traffic surging, the airwaves are becoming increasingly clogged – threatening both daily conveniences and essential services.
With a $550,000 CAREER award, Husker engineer Shubhendu Bhardwaj is tackling the problem with a paradigm-shifting strategy, one that overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches.
Instead of compressing data to squeeze more information into the wireless spectrum, Bhardwaj is designing devices capable of creating, transmitting and receiving vortex waves.
Vortex waves – corkscrew-shaped electromagnetic waves with spinning wavefronts – allow simultaneous transmission of multiple data streams along a single frequency.
Frequencies are a finite natural resource, regulated by the government. Bhardwaj’s approach will significantly improve wireless spectrum efficiency.
It’s also energy efficient, a major advantage. Data compression requires significant power to perform complex math. Bhardwaj’s hardware solutions are a passive approach that reduce complexity and energy use.
“We need fundamental innovations that go above and beyond traditional compression methods,” said Bhardwaj, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. “This is an alternate, energy-efficient way of reusing the same frequency to allow higher data rates.”
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Investigating the release of micro-, nanoplastics into the environment
Plastics transformed daily life, but fears about their health and environmental toll are growing.
Over time, plastics break down into micro- and nanoscale particles that are released into the environment and absorbed by humans and other organisms.
Nebraska engineer Lucia Fernandez-Ballester is investigating how plastics degrade with the aim of developing safer materials. She earned a nearly $740,000 CAREER award to advance her work.
Plastics are built from polymers, long chains of repeating molecular units called monomers. In a pioneering approach, Fernandez-Ballester is studying polymer manufacturing processes to better understand how plastic particles enter the environment.
“My project takes into account the entire life cycle of the polymers and to figure out the fundamentals of the polymer itself so that we can then make informed decisions about manufacturing and make safer materials,” said Fernandez-Ballester, assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering.
She was part of a Nebraska research team that found microwaving plastic baby food containers can release huge numbers of plastic particles, which can result in high rates of kidney cell mortality.
The research prompted Fernandez-Ballester to dig deeper into the manufacturing process. Even subtle changes to a polymer can dramatically affect the final product, she said.
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Studying how ‘disordered’ materials could transform next-generation electronics
The next generation of computing, including AI, seeks greater efficiency, power and speed by mimicking the human brain.
Mastering the complexity of biological neurons is a significant challenge. The answer may lie in disorder.
Nebraska physicist Robert Streubel seeks to advance neuromorphic computing and other microelectronics by investigating disordered noncrystalline materials. He was awarded a nearly $850,000 CAREER award.
“This work could fundamentally shift how we think about disorder in materials,” said Streubel, assistant professor of physics and astronomy. “Instead of being a limitation, disorder might actually be the key to unlocking new functionalities.”
His project focuses on magnetic materials that lack the regular atomic structure of crystals. Streubel’s team is investigating how the arrangement of atoms, even when seemingly out of their normal positions, can influence magnetic behavior and electronic properties.
By adjusting how these materials are made and applying physical changes like bending or stretching, researchers hope to unlock new ways to control these properties. Disordered materials offer the potential for greater manipulation and versatility than crystalline materials.
Unlike the energy-intensive binary supercomputers current AI systems rely on, systems modeled after biological neural networks promise greater energy efficiency.
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Studying how readers interpret informational graphics
A compelling design, an intuitive graph, a digestible chart … well-designed visuals help turn complex data into stories that are easier to understand.
To help scientists, educators and communicators convey information more effectively, Nebraska statistician Susan VanderPlas is researching how people use charts, and how to best design them to promote broad understanding, with a $550,000 CAREER award.
Earlier research focused on how accurately people could estimate values shown in a chart, such as a graph or diagram. VanderPlas is asking broader questions: Does the graphic help audiences understand the big picture? How do design choices shape the story people take away?
Her research draws on psychology to investigate how people perceive and create meaning from statistical graphics. By building frameworks to evaluate when graphics succeed or fail, she hopes to provide better design guidelines.
VanderPlas, associate professor of statistics, is also involving students, who are helping to generate research data while improving their ability to critically assess graphics. Additionally, she is developing strategies that use the power of art to attract students to the STEM fields.
As someone with colorblindness, VanderPlas says she understands how certain design choices can confuse or exclude readers.
“The goal is to help people create graphs that enable better data-driven decision making — whether in science or everyday life,” she said.
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Assessing the risks, benefits of machine learning
Dung Hoang Tran is exploring ways to ensure machine learning – a key element in artificial intelligence – is secure and verifiable.
With a nearly $690,000 CAREER award, Tran is using advanced mathematical concepts to improve machine learning and assess its risks and benefits.
AI is designed to learn on its own and adapt reliably to unpredictable situations, said Tran, a computer scientist who is now at the University of Florida. Machine learning makes this possible by finding patterns in data and using them to forecast outcomes.
The ability to learn and adapt allows machines to operate independently of humans, such as self-driving cars, unmanned drones and teams of robots working collaboratively for surveillance, monitoring or search-and-rescue missions.
Tran aims to create new ways to ensure these learning-enabled autonomous systems operate safely and reliably.
To promote trustworthy AI in a variety of fields, Tran will make the software and techniques publicly available. Hardware will be available to Nebraska students and research partners to strengthen collaborations.
“We will build strong mathematical operations and new data structures and algorithms so that we can verify a very complex AI system,” Tran said. “This is about how we guarantee that the next generation of AI stays secure and explainable.”