Dr. Mehmet Kurt Wins NSF CAREER Award

KurtLab is excited to announce that Dr. Mehmet Kurt has been awarded the Prestigious NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award!

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Only 500 of these grants are awarded each year.

The project is titled: Nonlinear Resonances of Highly Damped, Soft Materials. This research aims to make fundamental contributions to a modeling and system identification framework for characterizing the deformation response of highly damped, soft materials to steady-state and transient loading, with particular emphasis on deformation localization and damage in heterogeneous, membranous material systems. It achieves this via the following three aims:

This project also has a closely integrated research and education plan will excite student engagement in STEM through curriculum development, outreach workshops on helmet design, and digital arts exhibits. A dedicated effort to increase participation from the LGBTQ+ community, where a STEM visibility and underrepresentation problem currently exists, includes annual events, workshops, and mentoring networks.