The Department of Defense (DoD) has named Nader Engheta, the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor in Penn Engineering, and Robert Ghrist, a Penn Integrates Knowledge professor and the Andrea Mitchell University Professor in Mathematics and Electrical & Systems Engineering, as National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellows (NSSEFF). The NSSEFF

program awards grants to top-tier researchers from US universities to conduct long-term, unclassified, basic research of strategic importance to the DoD. Only seven scientists across the country were honored with this five-year fellowship in 2015.

Dr. Engheta will receive $3 million over five years to further his decades of foundational work on the science of metamaterials. These compound materials are engineered with nanoscale patterns that give rise to properties not found in naturally occurring substances.

Dr. Ghrist will receive $2.2 million over five years to continue his research in algebraic topology, a branch of mathematics that provides tools to visualize abstract spaces, such as finding gaps in a security network or automating robotic movement across a factory floor. His project is titled “LOCAL-to-GLOBAL: Algebraic Topology for Data, Networks and Systems” and will target “dimensionality reduction.”