Faculty members win DOE Early Career Program Awards

Two Carnegie Mellon faculty members, Carlee Joe-Wong and Thomas O’Connor, have both received the Early Career Program Award from the Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Science for their independent projects. The Early Career Program was established in 2010 and is a highly competitive funding opportunity for researchers at the early stages of their careers. Researchers are then able to begin their own independent projects in disciplines the DoE Office of Science has a particular interest in, such as computing research and various types of energy and environmental sciences.

Carlee Joe-Wong is the Robert E. Doherty associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Joe-Wong’s DoE funded project focuses on designing algorithms that can schedule and place scientific computing workloads in heterogeneous supercomputing clusters. Joe-Wong began investigating this topic due to the ever-growing range of computational science applications that must run on increasing complex computing systems. This diverse range of applications has resulted in a number of challenges, thereby significantly delaying crucial scientific data from being processed.

Joe-Wong’s algorithm project differs from prior research in specifically focusing on the hidden similarities in the job structure and performance of these heterogeneous workloads and machines. Joe-Wong will accomplish this by tracking the similarities over time, analyzing patterns between the machines and the various computing jobs they run. Joe-Wong’s method is a new approach to this topic, as previous studies generally assumed that the job similarities were known.

“I’m grateful to the DoE for giving me the support needed to sustain an effort along these directions for the next five years. Computing jobs are becoming ever more complex and important, and I’m excited to work on making them easier to run in heterogeneous clusters."

Thomas O’Connor, an assistant professor in materials science and engineering, applies simulations and high-performance computing to understand the molecular-scale behavior of polymers and soft materials. O’Connor’s Early Career Award will fund work focused on understanding the molecular origins of self-healing behavior in sustainable polymers. Self-healing polymers are plastics that have the potential to significantly reduce the amount of plastic waste we produce due to their unique ability to self-repair damage. However, the materials are difficult to design because of a lack of fundamental understanding of the molecular processes that drive self-healing.

O’Connor’s group will combine molecular simulations and self-healing experiments, to identify these molecular mechanisms in a diverse class of polymers called thermoplastic elastomers.

“The DoE's support will enable us to establish the fundamental knowledge that we need to design low-cost, repairable, and reusable plastics,” said O’Connor. “We are used to treating plastics as disposable, but they are the one type of material that can heal damage on their own. We want to harness that ability in order to make plastic components robust to wear and tear, and to reduce the number made and that end up in landfills.”