Department Of Defense Names Nine University Faculty To Receive Vannevar Bush Fellowships

The Department of Defense (DoD) has named nine recipients of the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowships for 2022. The Vannevar Bush fellowship is considered the Department of Defense’s most prestigious single-investigator award. Each fellowship provides five years of support for basic research with up to $3 million in funding.

Previously known as the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship, the fellowships’s name was changed in 2016 to honor Dr. Vannevar Bush, a former professor and dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who, during World War II, served as the director of the U.S. Defense Department’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, coordinating the work of thousands of scientists.

Bush’s 1945 report to the President of the United States, “Science, The Endless Frontier,” called for an expansion of government support for science, and he was one of the first to urge the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF), claiming that basic research was “the pacemaker of technological progress.”

Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowships aim to advance transformative, university-based fundamental research in areas of importance to DoD, such as materials science, bioengineering, networks and artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, quantum information sciences, and applied mathematics.

The objectives of the program are to:

• Support unclassified basic scientific and engineering research that could be the foundation for future revolutionary new capabilities for DoD.
• Educate and train student and post-doctoral researchers for the defense workforce.
• Foster long-term relationships between university researchers and the DoD.
• Familiarize university researchers and their students with DoD’s current and projected future challenges.
• Increase the number of talented technical experts that DoD can call upon.

“The Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship is the Department’s most prestigious research grant award,” said Dr. Jean-Luc Cambier, the VBFF Program Director in DoD’s announcement. “It is oriented towards bold and ambitious ‘blue sky’ research that will lead to extraordinary outcomes that may revolutionize entire disciplines, create entirely new fields, or disrupt accepted theories and perspectives.”

As with prior cohorts, the 2022 Class includes both scientists and engineers. Here are the nine winners:

George Karniadakis, Charles Pitts Robinson and John Palmer Barstow Professor of Applied Mathematics and Engineering, Brown University;

Andrew Stuart, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, California Institute of Technology;

Mark Schnitzer, Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor with a joint appointment in the Departments of Biology and of Applied Physics, Stanford University;

Neal Devaraj, Murray Goodman Endowed Chair in Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego;

Jun Ye, Fellow of JILA and Professor of Physics, University of Colorado;

Jelena Vuckovic, Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership in the School of Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University;

Christian van de Walle, Herbert Kroemer Professor of Materials Science, University of California, Santa Barbara;

Kunihiko Taira, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles;

Sharon Glotzer, Anthony C. Lembke Department Chair of Chemical Engineering, John Werner Cahn Distinguished University Professor of Engineering and Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering, University of Michigan.

In addition to their research projects, Vannevar Bush Fellows are encouraged to engage directly with the DoD, collaborate with DoD laboratories and share insights with DoD leadership and the broader national security community.

The Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship is sponsored by the Basic Research Office within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. The grants are managed by the Office of Naval Research. For the 2022 competition, more than 300 white papers were received from fellowship applicants.