Associate Professor Meredith Silberstein won 2020 DARPA Young Faculty Award

Meredith Silberstein

Meredith Silberstein, Associate Professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, was selected for the 2020 DARPA Young Faculty Award.

The DARPA Young Faculty Award program aims to identify and engage rising stars in junior research positions – exposing them to Department of Defense needs and DARPA’s program development process. This prestigious program provides funding, mentoring and industry contacts to awardees early in their careers so they may develop research ideas in the content of national security needs.

Silberstein’s topic area for the award is bioinspired soft matter electrical circuits, her proposal titled “Theory and Realization of Bioinspired Polyelectrolyte-Based Soft Matter Circuits.”

"This project will lead to a new approach for ionic circuit design, that rather than just mimicking functions from electronic circuits, will capitalize on the intrinsic properties of soft matter,” says Silberstein.

Silberstein research areas include polymers, mechanochemistry, material design and continuum mechanics. Her Mechanics for Materials Design Lab uses mechanical experiments and modeling methods in material design – with particular focus on multifunctional, active, and polymeric materials. 

Silberstein received her B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. After finishing her Ph.D., she went on to serve as a postdoctoral fellow at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, investigating mechanochemically active materials. She has won many notable awards during the course of her career including an NSF Career Award, Department of Energy Early Career Award and Air Force Research Laboratory Summer Faculty Fellowship – among many other teaching awards and fellowships.

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