The aptly named National Science Foundation CAREER award provides a big, prestigious boost for junior faculty who receive one. Chemical engineering assistant professor Sanaz Sadati is the latest UofSC faculty member to take her career to the next level with a $524,988 NSF CAREER award.
Dr. Sadati is a scholar of the highest degree, focused on deep and fundamental questions and mentoring graduate students at the forefront of innovations in materials underpinning technologies of the future.
— College of Engineering and Computing Dean Hossein Haj-Hariri
Dr. Sadati, who joined the College of Engineering and Computing faculty in 2019, serves as an outstanding example of the NSF CAREER award’s intent of funding outstanding junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research and education, and the integration of these endeavors in the context of their organizations’ missions. Dr. Sadati’s CAREER award will fund research into how blue phase liquid crystals form when they are confined within curved geometries. By discovering more about this little-understood process, Dr. Sadati will help advance knowledge that could be used in high-impact applications like fiber optics, wearable sensors and miniaturized, curved and flexible devices.
Sadati said, “I am very excited and deeply honored to receive this prestigious award. I understand that it is very competitive and the fact that the NSF panel has recognized my research will have a significant scientific impact is encouraging and also very important for my career.
“Liquid crystals with properties of both liquids and crystals and facile electric response are the heart of many displays and electro-optic technologies,” she continued. “In my lab, we are particularly interested in blue phase liquid crystals with twists and turns in their structures and fast optical and electrical response times.
“This award will allow us to develop a fundamental understanding of the crystallization and optical behavior of blue phases within curved confinement. This knowledge will serve as a basis for deploying these materials in advanced devices such as flexible displays and wearable sensors as well as information technologies.”
College of Engineering and Computing Dean Hossein Haj-Hariri congratulated Dr. Sadati on her outstanding work and CAREER award, saying, “Dr. Sadati is a scholar of the highest degree, focused on deep and fundamental questions and mentoring graduate students at the forefront of innovations in materials underpinning technologies of the future.”
13 December 2021