Penn Engineering Professor Deep Jariwala Receives Young Investigator Award from Army Research Office

By Lauren Salig

Deep Jariwala, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, has been awarded funding through the Army Research Office’s Young Investigator Program (YIP).

“YIP awards are one of the most prestigious honors bestowed by the Army on outstanding scientists beginning their independent careers,” according to the agency’s award announcement. “The objective of the YIP is to attract outstanding young university faculty members to pursue fundamental research in areas relevant to the Army, to support their research in these areas, and to encourage their teaching and research careers.”

Jariwala, who also won the Nanomaterials Young Investigators Award in 2018, will use the YIP to fund his research on the properties of mixed-dimensional nanomaterials:

“The goal of this project is to gain fundamental understanding of charge transport, transfer and photon emission mechanisms at atomic and molecular scale interfaces via assembly and engineering of new structures and interfaces, hitherto unexplored in quantum material systems.”

The award will provide Jariwala with $360,000 of support over three years.

The hope is that Jariwala’s Device Research and Engineering Lab will be able to create guidelines for using nanometer scale materials that will allow the integration of such materials into military technologies as well as improve the field’s understanding of these material’s properties.