College of Science Accolades: January 2022 – February 2022

Farhang Alem, School of Systems Biology, Center for Infectious Disease Research (CIDR), was awarded $30,000 for “Inhibition of cell-cell fusion as a potential mechanism for treatment of covid19” by Virginia Commonwealth University.

Eduardo Lopez Atencio, Computational and Data Sciences, along with Co-PIs Deborah Rupp, Psychology, Dale Rothman and William Kennedy, Computational and Data Sciences, was awarded $274,648 for “EAGER GERMINATION: Computational Modeling from Scenario Development: A Pedagogy for Generating Novel Research Questions to Address Critical Societal Issues” by the National Science Foundation.

Dean Baker, Center of Spatial Information Science and Systems (CSISS), was awarded $3,937 for “Advance FV3-CAM to improve wildfire detection, prediction and dust prediction” by the State of Maryland. Prime Sponsor: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Baker was also awarded $51,438 for “WF-1: Development of a machine learning emulator for CAM-CMAQ to improve wildfire smoke forecasts” by the State of Maryland. Prime Sponsor: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Steve Burmeister, Forensic Science, was recognized by students for being an outstanding Mason Core Writing Intensive in Major course teacher, receiving a 4.75 out of 5 on the element ‘My overall rating of teaching’ from the Student Ratings of Instruction. He has been recognized on multiple occasions for his teaching excellence of this course by the Mason Core Committee.

Brian Eckenrode, Forensic Science, was a member of the team awarded the 2021 FBI Director’s Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement for four research projects about Decision Analysis Studies for the latent print, handwriting, firearms, and shoeprint disciplines.

Chao Luo, Chemistry and Biochemistry, was awarded $577,070 for a NSF CAREER Award: “Organic Structure and Interphase Engineering for Fast-Charging, High-Temperature and Sustainable Batteries” by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Igor Mazin, Physics and Astronomy, Quantum Science and Engineering Center, co-authored a paper entitled “Photoinduced chiral charge density wave in TiSe2 Darshana Wickramaratne” in Physical Review B 105. Mazin co-authored an article entitled “Phase diagram of a distorted kagome antiferromagnet and application to Y-kapellasite” in Computational Materials Volume 8. Mazin, along with Patrick Vora, Physics and Astronomy, Quantum Science and Engineering Center, also co-authored a paper entitled “Charge density wave activated excitons in TiSe2–MoSe2 heterostructures” in APL Materials Volume 10. 

Edward Oughton, Geography and Geoinformation Sciences, was awarded $40,000 for “Digital Infrastructure Costing Estimator (DICE)” by the George Mason Research Foundation Inc.

Mariaelena Pierobon, School of Systems Biology, Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine (CAPMM), was awarded $14,460 for “A Systems Approach to Immunotherapy Biomarker Identification Within the Postoperative Wound-Healing Microenvironment in Patients with Gastroesophageal Cancer” by Inova Healthcare.

PeterPlavchan, Physics and Astronomy, was awarded $15,000 for “Precision modeling of telluric absorption features through the retrieval of atmospheric tract gases and spectroscopy update toward Extreme Precision Radial Velocity (EPRV) measurements” by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Prime Sponsor: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Erdal Yiğit, Physics and Astronomy, was awarded $331,593 for “Studying the mean and variable structure of the upper atmosphere using GOLD and ICON” by NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center.

Jie Zhang, Physics and Astronomy, was awarded $26,727 for “Understanding the Physical Processes that Govern the Structure and Dynamics of Coronal Mass Ejections” by the Predictive Science, Inc. Prime Sponsor: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).