Two Vermont Assistant Professors Receive DOE EPSCoR Awards
Two Vermont Assistant Professors are the beneficiaries of the US Department of Energy's (DOE) plan to award $21 million in funding for 29 new projects through DOE EPSCoR Lab Partnerships. The two recipients are Jihong Ma, PhD of the University of Vermont (UVM) for her project "Multi-scale Study of Self-Healing Polymers to Enhance Carbon Dioxide Removal" and Ben Cotts of Middlebury College for his project "Elucidating Transient Localized Disorder of Semiconductor Nanocrystals."
Vermont was one of 18 states and Puerto Rico to receive funding as part of this award. “The projects selected for awards will help to build expertise and capabilities at the EPSCoR institutions and will strengthen their connections to the wealth of capabilities at the DOE national laboratories," said Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Director of the DOE Office of Science in discussing the funding.
Jihong Ma, an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, joined UVM in August 2020 and received her PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Her research at UVM includes work on the structure-property relationship of materials at multiple scales (from nano- to macro-) via a combination of theoretical analysis, numerical simulations, and experimental characterizations. This research aims to enhance material performance or uncover new material characteristics for industrial, medical, and aerospace applications.
Ben Cotts is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Middlebury College. He joined Middlebury in 2021 and received his PhD in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. He runs the Cotts Lab, which does research focused on finding new forms of abundant and affordable clean energy. Specifically, the lab uses time-resolved spectroscopies to track excited electrons under different sample conditions.
For more information about the BES awards, including a full list of awardees, please visit https://go.uvm.edu/aeulz.