School of Engineering faculty awarded 5 NSF CAREERs

Five faculty members in The University of New Mexico School of Engineering (SoE) have received National Science Foundation CAREER Awards in what is believed to be a single-year record for the school.

NSF CAREERs provide five years of sustained funding to pre-tenure faculty for deep exploration into a promising research topic likely to advance scientific knowledge.

SoE's five recipients this year are:

• Afsah Anwar, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science
• Claus Danielson, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering
• Maryam Hojati, assistant professor in the Gerald May Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering
• John King, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
• Heng Zuo, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering

The awards come after the creation of the NSF CAREER Writing Cohort, a workshop series led by Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs Eva Chi and Faculty Research Support Officer Isela Balli. The cohort began in February 2025 and was open to faculty members in and outside of the School of Engineering.

Making internet access safer: Afsah Anwar's CAREER Award

Assistant Professor Anwar's project, titled "Robust, Platform-Agnostic Defense Against VPN Misconfiguration Abuse in Malware Campaigns," will aim to make internet access safer by investigating VPNs with malware. When a user installs a VPN on their device, their internet traffic reaches the VPN server before visiting sites selected by the user, like Google or Amazon. In the process, identifying information, like the user's IP address and other device information, is disguised and protected. While VPNs are intended to hide user information and enhance privacy while using the internet, malicious groups can steal the personal information instead of protecting it. Bad-faith groups may design software for the opposite purpose, harvesting personal information for malicious purposes.

"If you live in an oppressive regime, your information could be personally targeted," Anwar said. "This work can help organizations set up VPNs directly and will allow users to see if their VPNs have any malicious objectives."

Anwar's CAREER award expands on research into mobile VPNs that he was collaborating on with the University of Michigan. He credits the UNM Department of Computer Science for its support of early-career faculty.

Making intelligent systems scalable through efficiency: Claus Danielson's CAREER Award

Assistant Professor Claus Danielson's project, titled "Exploiting Symmetry for Extreme-Scale Constrained Dynamical Systems," explores a new approach to scalable autonomy: enabling intelligent systems to make decisions more efficiently rather than relying on ever-increasing computational resources.

Rather than scaling autonomous systems through massive data centers, specialized hardware, or large amounts of memory, Danielson's research seeks to identify and exploit structure within complex systems to intelligently reuse computations and reduce computational requirements. The goal is to make autonomous decision-making more scalable, efficient, and deployable in real-world applications operating under computational and hardware constraints.

The project focuses on developing new algorithms that leverage structural properties, particularly symmetry, in large-scale engineered systems such as logistics networks, power systems, and other interconnected infrastructures. By exploiting these structural relationships, the research aims to enable efficient decision-making in systems that would otherwise be computationally prohibitive.

"My broader research focuses on building autonomous systems that are both adaptable and trustworthy by combining data-driven learning with the rigor of control and optimization theory," Danielson said. "This NSF CAREER award supports this research agenda by improving the computational scalability of autonomous decision-making, helping bridge the gap between theory and deployment."

Developing fire-resistant construction materials: Maryam Hojati's CAREER Award

Assistant Professor Maryam Hojati's project, titled "Fire Resistant Geopolymer Materials for Resilient Structures in Wildfire Prone Regions," focuses on developing fire-resistant construction materials to improve the resilience of buildings in wildfire-prone regions, an urgent need in New Mexico and across the western United States where increasingly severe wildfires continue to impact communities and infrastructure. Her research explores the use of geopolymers, a class of advanced materials known for their durability and high-temperature performance, and how they can be adapted for construction systems exposed to extreme heat. By examining how material composition and internal structure influence behavior under elevated temperatures, the work seeks to inform the design of more resilient building materials.

Hojati's project will contribute to a larger movement in the civil engineering field to transition from traditional fire testing of materials to predictive modeling.

"Predictive modeling complements traditional fire-testing by allowing us to simulate how materials respond under different fire scenarios," Hojati said. "This approach expands our ability to study thermal behavior beyond what is feasible experimentally and supports more efficient, performance-driven material design."

The project builds on other construction materials testing she leads through the Advanced Sustainable Construction Lab at UNM. Hojati's work integrates material innovation with emerging technologies such as digital fabrication and intelligent construction systems. Her research addresses key challenges in modern infrastructure, including climate impacts, aging systems, and the growing demand for sustainable and resilient design, while bridging fundamental science and practical engineering applications.

Understanding how nucleic acids and amino acids interact: John King's CAREER Award

Interactions between nucleic and amino acids are central to biology -- from the way our bodies translate genetic information to how we process viral infections -- but how those interactions take place is poorly understood. Assistant Professor John King's project, titled "Excited States and their Role in Protein-RNA Binding Dynamics," will utilize single-molecule spectroscopy to characterize how these natural processes work.

King's goals for the work are two-fold: From a physical perspective, better understanding of the interactions could enable engineers to develop targeted therapeutics. From a practical perspective, modeling the interactions could offer key insights into the way other natural systems operate.

His CAREER award will support both undergraduates and graduate students working in his lab.

"Having undergraduates in the lab is the best and really just an extremely good opportunity for their education," he said. "They're typically very excited to get into the lab."

As part of the award, King will support STEM outreach by designing a program that helps kids design and operate homemade spectroscopic equipment.

Using ultrafast lasers for precision manufacturing of advanced ceramic materials: Heng Zuo's CAREER Award

Assistant Professor Heng Zuo's project, titled "Ultrafast Laser Manufacturing of Polymer-Derived Ceramics for High-Performance Ceramic Composite Materials," focuses on developing new ways to use ultrafast lasers to manufacture polymer-derived ceramics and ceramic composite materials with improved control over their structure and properties.

Advanced ceramic composites are used in demanding applications ranging from space exploration and energy systems to semiconductor technologies and biomedical devices. However, conventional ceramic manufacturing often involves multiple processing steps and can offer limited control over material structure at small length scales. Zuo's project aims to address this challenge by studying how extremely short laser pulses interact with preceramic polymers and how those interactions can be used to shape, modify, and transform materials with high precision.

"Because the laser pulses are so short, energy can be delivered to very small regions before heat has time to spread, which means we can sculpt or transform materials at the micron scale while minimizing damage to the surrounding material," Heng said. "For advanced manufacturing, this opens the door to building materials whose properties can be tailored exactly where they are needed in a part. At the same time, we are uncovering new manufacturing science that can help guide how these materials are designed and made."

This five-year award will support Zuo's research program at the intersection of advanced manufacturing, laser processing, and materials science. It will also create new opportunities for student training, curriculum development, and outreach in an emerging area of advanced manufacturing.

SoE supports faculty with grant-writing cohort

The latest batch of CAREER Award recipients were among the first group of faculty at SoE able to take part in the NSF CAREER Cohort.

Writing grant proposals can be a process of trial and error for new faculty. Even when a professor is certain of their research agenda, funding agencies may be looking for different specific elements to be included.

"I had been thinking about how to better support faculty with proposal writing," Associate Dean Chi said. "We started with the CAREER Award because it is a marquee for faculty members who do NSF research."

SoE worked with UNM's Federal Research Support Office to host sessions on writing one-pagers, creating data management plans, acquiring a letter from a department chair, creating budgets and understanding what resources UNM makes available. The cohort also provided dedicated writing time and a Q&A session with recently awarded CAREER recipients.

"The cohort is a launching point that helps faculty get from an idea to a proposal through feedback, support and better understanding of the process," Balli said. "We anticipate the members of the cohort will have a better growth trajectory and be more likely to submit proposals."

All of the 2025 cohort participants surveyed said they would recommend the experience to a colleague. Participants in the Spring 2026 cohort will have the option to submit proposals next month.