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Wei Li (center) is pictured in the U.S. Treasury Building with Dr. Arden L. Bement
Jr., Director of National Science Foundation, and Dr. John H. Marburger III, Director of Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President. (Photo by Bill Ingalls) |
Wei Li (PhD ME '99), assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, has been awarded a prestigious 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). John H. Marburger, III, science advisor to the president and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy presented the awards at a ceremony at the Department of the Treasury in Washington, D.C.
Each year the National Science Foundation selects nominees for Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from among the most meritorious new Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awardees. PECASE awards recognize outstanding and early-career scientists and engineers who show exceptional promise for pioneering research. The award is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on scientists and engineers early in their careers.
Assistant Professor Li earned the award in recognition of his work on an "innovative fabrication process for hierarchically structured open cell porous polymeric materials and for outreach to underrepresented groups.”
The objective of his research program is to develop a process to create polymeric microstructures with well-defined, interconnected pores on the scale of 100 nanometers to several hundred micrometers and at desired locations. Such microstructures allow particles and fluids to flow through, offering tunable mass transport properties that are crucial to many emerging applications such as tissue engineering scaffolds, controlled drug delivery devices, adsorption sites for bio-chemical sensors and catalyst carriers for fuel cells, he explained.
His work involves selectively foaming gas-impregnated polymers and imploding the gas bubbles using focused ultrasound. Inert gases such as CO2 and N2 are used as the blowing agents.
Assistant Professor Li's research also includes fundamental studies to explore gas-polymer interaction, bubble dynamics, and ultrasonic cavitation, implosion and bubble-enhanced heating phenomena, the underlying mechanisms of which are not yet well understood by scientists.
Finally, the educational component of Assistant Professor Li's PECASE award focuses on promoting interdisciplinary training "to better prepare students for the rapidly changing technical diversity of today’s engineering profession. I plan to develop innovative curricula and teaching methods, recruiting and mentoring programs that target women and minority students and to involve undergraduates and K-12 students and teachers in this research."
It was his own mentors, Professors Jun Ni and S. Jack Hu, at U-M who Assistant Professor Li credits with encouraging his exploration of the field of manufacturing research. "I found it to be very exciting, and the training I received at U-M provided a solid foundation for my later research."