Two Florida Tech Engineering and Science Faculty Members Win National Science Foundation Grants

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They were each awarded two-year, $200,000 grants.

College of Engineering and Science Fellows Anand Balu Nellipelil and Pavitra Pathiratana have each been awarded a two-year $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s highly competitive Engineering Research Initiative Program. (Image of Florida Tech)

BREVARD COUNTY • MELBOURNE, Florida – College of Engineering and Science Fellows Anand Balu Nelipalil and Pavitra Pathiratana have each been awarded two-year, $200,000 grants through the National Science Foundation’s highly competitive Engineering Research Initiative Program.

These awards, selected by the NSF Directorate for Engineering, are designed to build engineering research capacity across the country by investing in and supporting emerging academic investigators “as they begin their research programs and advance in their careers as researchers, educators, and innovators.” The agency said.

Nelipalil is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and principal investigator in the Systems Realization Laboratory at Florida Tech. The winning ERI project is “Multidisciplinary Co-Design of Materials, Products and Manufacturing Processes”.

NSF funding supports Nellipelil by exploring new ways to consider manufacturing processes in the early stages of materials and product design.

By doing so, designers can make effective decisions to tailor material microstructures and achieve desired product performance as envisioned by integrated computational materials engineering.

The project will strategically combine knowledge and techniques from the fields of systems engineering, engineering design and materials science to advance the science of fundamental understanding of the interrelationships between products, materials and manufacturing processes.

It also supports graduate students and enhances the graduate student program at Florida Tech. Nellipelil has an open Ph.D. Student positions in his lab.

Pathirathna is Assistant Professor of Chemistry. Her winning ERI project was titled “Ultrafast, robust, novel four-bore carbon-fiber microelectrodes for one-time electrochemical detection of multiple neurotransmitters and toxic metals.

While much of Pathiratana’s research focuses on developing “smart, portable, fast, light and cheap” sensors, her ERI project seeks to develop an electrochemical sensing system that can identify heavy metals in the brain and better understand their role. In nervous diseases.

She does this by developing a “novel, robust electrochemical sensor that can rapidly, simultaneously measure heavy metals and multiple neurotransmitters.”

The sensor is operated using carbon fiber microelectrodes, and data acquisition and analysis is performed using fast-scan cyclic voltammetry.

There are only five active ERI projects in Florida, and two are at Florida Tech.

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