In
2015, Venkata Gadhamshetty, Ph.D., achieved a level of success known by a
relatively small number of researchers when he landed a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER
award. Five years
later, the hard work of Gadhamshetty and his collaborators is paying off with
about $34 million in funded research across multiple fields.
The
goal of the NSF CAREER program is to empower early career scientists to open
doors to entirely new directions of research. Gadhamshetty’s work involves emerging
classes of materials that can aid in everything from building ultralight vehicles,
to protective coatings for metals, to new ways to harness and store
energy from the natural world and more. His research on generating electricity from defective tomatoes brought acclaim from the History Channel
and worldwide media attention.
One
of his main goals is to better understand how microbes interact with matter on the atomic level and how this understanding could aid
engineering applications. “These are questions that could engage thousands of
people in this research for years to come,” he say...