Three UCF faculty were named 2025 U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award winners while two recent faculty hires transferred their CAREER projects to continue their work at Florida’s Premier Engineering and Technology University.
All five awardees teach and conduct research through UCF’s College of Engineering and Computer Science (CECS), and together their funding totals an estimated $3 million to advance real world technologies and positively impact the world.
The annual award program from NSF supports an estimated 500 early-career STEM faculty nationwide from either institutes of higher education or academic nonprofit organizations 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.
Since the program launched in FY 1995, nearly 100 UCF faculty have qualified for NSF CAREER grants, generating more than $40 million in research funding. It has supported a pathway to implement their research through UCF’s Office of Technology Transfer, which helps bring discoveries to the marketplace through licensing UCF technologies and providing information about sponsored research opportunities.
UCF Associate Professors Sidong Lei and Truong Nghiem along with Assistant Professors Kevin Moran, Wen Shen and Hao Zheng continue to accelerate research in their respective fields through their NSF CAREER projects.
Studying Specialized Semiconductors
Sidong Lei
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
NanoScience Technology Center (NTSC)
Project Title: Van der Waals Semiconductor Integration via Surface and Interface Tailoring
Award: $516,085 over five years, with $449,136 over three years at UCF
Sidong Lei endeavors to meet the demand for better materials to help make smaller devices run more efficiently.
“We all want our phones, smartwatches and laptops to be lighter, faster and more powerful,” says Lei, an associate professor of materials science and engineering. “To make that happen, we need to shrink the size of the electronic circuits so that more components, such as transistors, which are tiny switches for computing, can fit onto a single chip.”
Lei researches new methods of developing innovative microelectronics by studying electronic and optoelectronic properties of emerging materials.
“As we push the limits of traditional silicon technology into the sub-10 nanometer range, it becomes extremely difficulty to make the chips even smaller,” he says. “At the same time, new technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are demanding faster speeds, lower energy use and many more. All these make current microelectronics struggle and urge new materials and device architecture.”
Through the NSF CAREER award he received in 2023 and brought with him to UCF the following year, Lei is exploring how Van der Waals semiconductors may be integrated at the 3D level versus the 2D level. These specialized semiconductors represent a major frontier in materials science, offering a path to ultrathin, flexible and high-performance electronic and photonic devices— pushing beyond the limits of traditional bulk semiconductors such as silicon.
“The question is how can we produce functional devices with these materials?” Lei says. “Other than fundamental investigations, we want to see our explorations and innovations find practical applications in critical fields. My research aims to find pathways towards this purpose.”
His NSF CAREER project, much like the advanced materials he studies, integrates well with his group’s portfolio of research and translates into real-world applications.
“We are developing methods to fabricate very large-scale integration circuit based on 2D materials and looking for strategies to combine them with mature silicon technology to further enhance their functionality,” Lei says. “We are also investigating strategies to fabricate very-large-scale integrated circuits in flexible and stretchable packaging materials. This research will allow us to implement next-generation wearable and implantable electronics devices for health monitoring and disease treatment, for example, on Parkinson’s disease.”
The vast opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration to advance research at UCF were a significant factor in Lei’s decision to expanding his career here.
“UCF offers a comprehensive platform to elevate my research,” he says. “Modern scientific and technological challenges are typically highly complex, requiring the integration of expertise from different fields. The integration is truly happening here. Only a few months after joining, I have already become acquainted with many new colleagues who are experts in their respective fields, continually refreshing my perspective.”
Lei considers his triumph in earning an NSF CAREER award funding a shared effort, and he credits UCF and his colleagues for their unwavering support and guidance.
“The award represents a meaningful confirmation from my peers of my efforts and endeavors,” he says. “However, the most enjoyable and exciting part was the journey itself, which included deciding on research directions, building a research team and then gradually generating results.”
Improving User Interface Experiences
Kevin Moran
Department of Computer Science
Cyber Security and Privacy Cluster
Project Title: Enhanced UI Engineering via Automated Semantic Screen Understanding
Award: $582,308 over five years
Whether it’s a smart phone or a computer, the user interface (UI) is a critical gateway for people interacting with software and technology.
An intuitive UI can make a world of difference to new users and ultimately be the deciding factor for users when it comes to feeling comfortable with technology, says Kevin Moran, assistant professor of computer science.
His research group at UCF aims to make it easier for software engineers to build complex yet user-friendly systems that translate into practical use.
“More aspects of daily life rely on software than at any point in human history,” he says. “From banking to social media, the importance of the quality of the software that we interact with on a daily basis has never been more important. My lab at UCF aims to help provide engineers the tools that they need to wrangle this complexity, using machine learning, program analysis, and careful tool design.”
Through his Software Automation, Generation, and Engineering (SAGE) Lab, Moran and his research group help simplify the difficulties engineers may face in building and troubleshooting such complicated systems. His research tackles two challenges in software engineering: making issue tracking (also known as bug reporting) more robust and improving the UI engineering process.
UI engineering is the practice of developing, testing and managing UI software, which is an emerging topic his group specializes in, and it is the focus of his newly awarded NSF CAREER project.
“My team and I have done quite a bit of work on UI engineering, a research area we pioneered,” Moran says. “Building the user interfaces for software has long been documented to be a particularly challenging task. My team and I were among the first to combine program analysis, computer vision, and machine learning techniques to develop tools to help aid developers in engineering high quality UIs.”
His project focuses on automating tedious tasks for software engineers through artificial intelligence (AI). The proposed AI model will learn from UI interactions, understand UI features, and automatically translate them to code for engineers.
Ultimately, this may save software engineers time and increase their efficiency in developing UIs, Moran says.
“Our aim with this work is to get our developed programming tools to software engineers so that they can improve the quality of the UIs they are building,” he says. “For the general public that uses software, this means UIs that are easier to use and contain fewer bugs.”
The path to earning such a prestigious grant like the NSF CAREER award requires a high level of detail and Moran says receiving one is incredibly gratifying.
“CAREER proposals are rigorously reviewed by other scientists in my area of research, and receiving the grant is tremendous validation for a very ambitious future research agenda related to improving UI engineering,” he says. “This award will fund students who will be working on projects to help make it easier for developers to build high quality user interfaces, so that hopefully in the future, we can reduce the frustrating interactions that users may have when interacting with software.”
Moran says UCF provided a space for professional growth. The university’s vast resources, which include welcoming and collaborative faculty, helped to further hone his skills that ultimately led to receiving his NSF CAREER award.
“Being a part of this academic community lead to the formation of some of the ideas in my proposal and I am excited to be a part of computer science at UCF, particularly as we expand our department and expertise in AI,” Moran says. “CECS has a CAREER mentoring program where I was paired with senior scientists in my area of work who were able to give me early feedback on my proposal. They helped me to refine the plan of work and gave me invaluable suggestions. UCF played a key part in my success for this award”
Machine Learning Guidance to Make Smart Systems Even Smarter
Truong Nghiem
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Project Title: Composite Physics-Informed Learning of Dynamics Systems
Award: $477,585 over five years
Associate Professor Truong Nghiem came to UCF in Fall 2024, bringing expertise in machine learning and autonomous systems.
His research focuses on developing new methods that blend machine learning with physical principles to improve complex systems such as autonomous vehicles, smart buildings and industrial automation systems.
“My work aims to help create the intelligent, autonomous systems of the future—systems that will enhance productivity, improve safety, and make everyday life more convenient and sustainable,” says Nghiem, whose research group is called the intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems (iCPS) Lab. “I specialize in intelligent cyber-physical systems — engineered systems that seamlessly integrate the cyber world, which includes computation, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), with the physical world, which includes mechanical and dynamic systems like vehicles, buildings and robots.”
His CAREER project, which he transferred from his previous university, directly supports his ongoing efforts and broadens the scope of his machine learning research.
“This research aims to create a composite physics-informed machine learning (CPIML) framework,” Nghiem says. “Physics-informed machine learning (PIML) embeds the laws of physics into the learning process, leading to models that are more accurate, physically consistent and interpretable compared to traditional machine learning approaches. CPIML takes this a step further by enabling the composition of both physics-based models and PIML components — along with their physical properties — to model more complex, large-scale systems.”
Applications of machine learning that may be integrated into everyday life include improved response times of autonomous vehicles and robots, smarter energy systems that optimize energy use and temperature control, and more reliable industrial robotic systems that require minimal supervision.
Nghiem says he strives for his research to not only provide foundational knowledge but to also have a direct impact on real technologies that people are using right now.
“As our world becomes increasingly automated, ensuring that systems are safe, efficient and trustworthy isn’t just a scientific goal — it’s a societal necessity,” he says. “I have developed efficient models for HVAC systems in buildings that improve energy management, and I’ve also worked on predictive models for autonomous racing cars, pushing the boundaries of what AI can do in dynamic, high-speed environments.”
Like the complex systems Nghiem studies, a university’s network of resources should be robust and reliable. He says he’s fortunate that his research fits perfectly into UCF’s supportive interdisciplinary ecosystem.
“UCF’s commitment is evident through initiatives like the AI Initiative and the Knights Digital Twin Initiative,” Nghiem says. “This work also underscores the importance of combining knowledge from different domains, bringing together AI, engineering and physics to create solutions for real-world problems.”
Elevating Rare Earth Elements to Make Powerful Magnets
Wen Shen
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE)
NanoScience Technology Center
Project Title: Manufacturing of Rare Earth Permanent Magnets via Three-dimensional Printing and Decomposition of Hydrogels
Award: $697,264 over five years
Rare earth permanent magnets (REPMs) — composed of alloys containing rare-earth elements — are the strongest permanent magnets with numerous applications across aerospace, automotive, electronics, medical devices and renewable energy industries due to their exceptional magnetic properties.
REPMs generate strong magnetic fields through aligned atomic structures, attracting ferromagnetic materials by inducing a magnetic field, enabling them to lift heavy loads, power motors and generate energy in various technologies.
Despite their widespread use, current REPMs manufacturing techniques are energy- intensive, complex and struggle to fabricate magnets with intricate shapes and minimal defects.
That’s where Wen Shen, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCF, comes in. Her NSF CAREER project aims to develop a new hydrogel-based additive manufacturing process that fabricates high-quality REPMs more efficiently.
The new fabrication process, which uses 3D printing and decomposition of hydrogels containing rare-earth elements, has tremendous potential, Shen says.
“This research will enable an energy-efficient and laser-free additive manufacturing process that fabricates REPMs with near-zero defects as well as excellent magnetic and mechanical properties,” she says. “If successful, the outcome of this research will significantly impact the global REPMs market.”
Shen says she’s honored to be an NSF CAREER award recipient and continues to elevate her impactful research.
“The CAREER award allows me to conduct in-depth studies,” she says. “It fits well into my career, allowing me to advance my goals as both a researcher and educator while fostering impactful contributions to academia and industry.”
UCF encourages state-of-the-art research through its resources, educational opportunities and collaborative environment. Shen says that she and her colleagues are grateful for the vast availability of university-wide support that helps advance their research and allows faculty to thrive.
“The fellowships as well as the research facilities and infrastructure provided by the MAE department, CECS [the College of Engineering and Computer Science] and NSTC [NanoScience Technology Center] to my group allowed me to conduct unique and transformative research that can make potential societal impacts,” Shen says. “I would like to acknowledge my department chair, the CECS dean, [and] the NSTC director, who have been very supportive of my research since I joined UCF.”
New Chips to Keep Pace with Modern Processing Demands
Hao Zheng
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Project Title: A Scalable, Polymorphic, and Efficient Architecture for Irregular and Sparse Computations (APEX)
Award: $550,000 over five years
The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, while transformative, has created new challenges for today’s computing hardware.
Hao Zheng, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, says he’s determined to navigate these challenges and arrive at solutions. His NSF CAREER project, much like his research, focuses on how to enhance the performance, energy efficiency and utility of chip processors to support the evolving landscape of AI workloads.
“My research lies in the area of computer architecture and machine learning,” Zheng says. “I aim to design versatile chip processors that can greatly speed up machine learning applications with significantly reduced power consumption.”
Creating general-purpose or fully customized chips have been the most common methods of addressing emerging challenges in computational tasks, but both approaches have drawbacks.
Zheng’s bold solution is to design a chip that can adapt to any applications with various computing tasks. His research group, the Intelligent Computer Architecture and Technology (iCAT) Laboratory, is working to revolutionize current chip architectures, such as graphics processing units (GPUs), to handle the rising complexity of modern AI workloads. These include not just large models but multimodal systems, robotics, simulations and real-time decision-making.
“Specializing the underlying hardware architecture has become a trending solution to meet the computational demands of modern applications,” Zheng says. “However, current specialized hardware, in the form of accelerators, is either fully customized for regular applications or lacks the generality to support a wide range of applications. However, today’s applications are evolving rapidly with increasingly complex workloads such as large language models, multi-modal models, embodied AI, among others.”
Some real-world applications of his research can directly affect how robotics, augmented and virtual reality, autonomous driving, simulations and biological discoveries operate.
“This award will introduce a transformative concept — the polymorphic chip processor — to support ubiquitous irregular and complex applications with intensive data,” Zheng says. “The research will invent a new class of chip processors, grounded in graph theory, that can dynamically adapt to irregular and complex workloads at runtime. We believe this can have a transformative impact on computer architecture, compilers, scheduling and many other key areas in computing.”
Zheng says his NSF CAREER award is just the beginning of what he can achieve here at UCF.
“This honor is a testament to the collective efforts of my entire research team,” he says. “I truly appreciate the collaborative research culture here at UCF. I’ve also benefited greatly from the guidance and encouragement of my colleagues, and I would like to thank our department chair, Dr. Reza Abdolvand, for his support over the past several years. Most importantly, I feel incredibly fortunate to have worked with four exceptional Ph.D. students who have grown alongside me throughout this journey.”
Opportunities for growth and enrichment at UCF are plenty, Zheng says. Exploring emerging unconventional applications for chips, strengthening educational development and collaborating with industry are three pillars he aspires to focus on and expand as he continues his research.
“First, I plan to establish a solid theoretical foundation for irregular application acceleration,” Zheng says. “Second, I intend to collaborate with industry to prototype the concept. By the end of the award period, we aim to have a functional chip processor running in the lab, demonstrating the practicality of our idea.”
One of the most important and personal components of his future efforts is his emphasis on education.
“This is the core mission of both our university and the academic community,” Zheng says. “As a first-generation college student, I am aware that a significant number of UCF students come from similar backgrounds. I will provide mentorship to both undergraduate and graduate students interested in the chip industry.”
