Assistant Professor Nga Nguyen demonstrates a small-scale wind turbine she uses
in her K-12 outreach presentations.
Published February 05, 2025
By Micaela Myers
The National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program supports research and outreach.
The National Science Foundation recognizes up-and-coming faculty members with the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. Read more about research and outreach from three recent UW winners.
Nga Nguyen – Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Our nation’s power supply is changing quickly as more renewable energy sources come online. Assistant Professor Nga Nguyen earned a CAREER award to further her research on the stability and reliability of power grids.
“My research for the award will investigate the application of energy storage systems to improve stability and reliability,” Nguyen says. “Renewable energy resources have intermittent and low inertia characteristics, which make it harder for our power grids to maintain stability. Therefore, power systems need support from energy storage systems, as they have high capacity and fast response. Our work will optimize the operation of energy storage systems to increase the system’s stability while maximizing the integration of renewable resources.”
Nguyen has studied power systems for more than a decade, driven by a desire to bring clean reliable power to more users.
Two summer camps are planned to introduce K–12 students to concepts related to STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics —and to train UW graduate students in teaching and mentoring.
“We hope to support and provide training to the younger generations of Wyoming so that we will have a strong and sustainable STEM workforce in the future,” Nguyen says.
The project includes working closely with UW colleagues, Sandia National Laboratories, Moser Energy and Powder River Energy Corp.
“This project also fosters economic development by providing optimal operation and energy management of the power grid,” Nguyen says. “It strengthens the stability and reliability of the grids, which are the spine of our industry.”
Diksha Shukla – Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
It seems like every day there’s a new cybersecurity threat or breach. Despite our best efforts at pins, passcodes and authentication software, it’s a constant game of staying one step ahead of hackers and malware.
Assistant Professor Diksha Shukla is addressing this challenge through her CAREER award, studying whether brain signals could serve as a unique, secure and reliable way to authenticate users on computing devices.
“Our research focuses on the foundational science and development of algorithms to understand user brain behavior and making it possible to leverage brain signals for user authentication, with a special focus on implementing these systems for augmented reality and virtual reality technologies,” Shukla says. “This involves understanding how brain signals can uniquely identify individuals and creating the technology to use these signals effectively for secure authentication. Another key aspect in this research is developing a threat model and evaluating the authentication system’s resilience to various possible security and privacy threats.”
Shukla envisions the integration of EEG-based authentication systems into emerging technologies, a key outcome of the work. That will pave the way for future additional advances such as using brain signals as a novel means of interacting with technology.
The outreach component of the work will include cybersecurity and machine learning modules with a special focus on brain-computer interaction technologies for UW courses. It also includes offering research experiences for UW students and K–12 rural students and teachers.
Bree Doering – Department of Anthropology
In 2023, Assistant Professor Bree Doering became the first UW anthropologist to earn the prestigious CAREER award.
For the project, Doering is studying the historic diet of interior Alaskan Indigenous communities using a sophisticated chemical sampling technique. The sampling allows her to identify fish and birds in the remains of ancient cooking pits, which will shed light on how much these communities fished and what fish they ate. Doering will work with local communities to better understand different cooking traditions and use that information to analyze the results.
“This project is unique because I will look at archaeological material that has been sampled over the past decades, gather more material from important sites, and use Indigenous knowledge and partnership to interpret the results,” she says.
Doering grew up in Alaska. Each year she travels to “fish camp” in the community of Nenana, where Indigenous elders and children come together over traditional practices of preservation, canning, smoking and filleting fish. The experience inspired her work.
“Fishing has become really threatened in the last decade — to the extent that Alaskan Native communities are no longer able to fish for salmon in the rivers that they have for millennia,” she says.
When the project is complete, the results may help Indigenous communities reestablish fishing rights.
“This project is providing paid hands-on scientific opportunities for Alaska Native youth and applied training to dozens of UW students inside and beyond the classroom,” Doering says. “Ultimately, this research will explore one way that Western theory and Indigenous ways of knowing might be meaningfully integrated in our understanding of past environments.”