Natural Sciences
Susan Clark, Grant Rotskoff win NSF CAREER awards
From the not-so-empty space between the stars to tiny molecules critical to understanding human disease, two recent National Science Foundation CAREER award projects highlight the wide range of research underway in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. The awards, which come with several years of funding, recognize promising junior early-career faculty who have the potential to lead in both research and education.
Susan Clark, assistant professor of physics, received the award for the project “Untangling the physics of the magnetic, multi-phase interstellar medium,” which comes with expected funding of about $840,000 over five years. With this support, Clark’s team will investigate “interstellar” materials, those that exist in the space between stars, which include diffuse gas, dust, and invisible magnetic fields. Clark will lead the effort to develop new ways to deal with complex data as well as approaches to determining the phase structure of interstellar gas. The project also includes development of educational materials for graduate students and a dual-enrollment astrophysics course that will serve low-income high school students.
Grant Rotskoff, assistant professor of chemistry, earned the CAREER award for the project “Accelerating conformational sampling of biomolecules with transferable generative models.” It will be supported by approximately $700,000 of expected funding over five years. The project aims to make studying complex biological molecules faster and more efficient using generative artificial intelligence models similar to those used in image or text generation. The tools developed in this project will enable studies of proteins that lack a stable folded structure, which are not well understood despite their relevance for human disease. The project’s educational component will include development of a new undergraduate course at Stanford as well as online tutorials about these types of models for high school students and teaching modules for high school chemistry teachers.
Photo of Susan Clark by Harrison Truong for Stanford University. Photo of Grant Rotskoff by Do Pham/Stanford University.
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