University of New Orleans professor Gabriel Caruntu has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development grant from the National Science Foundation. The five-year grant is worth $600,000. Caruntu is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Advanced Materials Research Institute.
The award is considered one of the NSF’s most prestigious awards and is given to junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and integration of education and research.
The grant will support Caruntu’s sophisticated chemistry and nanotechnology-related project which involves a class of materials known as perovskites. Perovskites are naturally occurring minerals. The work is done on a nanoscale range where the size of the test materials is in the one-billionth of a meter range.
The objective of the project is to study the structure and manipulate the properties of these materials at the nanoscale level so that the final product is better suited to be used in applications such as sensors, communication devices and data storage. Flash drives and atomizers for insulin inhalers are just two examples of devices that use perovskites.
Caruntu’s research program also involves outreach efforts that will serve to expose minority undergraduate and high school students to basic research, giving them a greater understanding of what careers in science entail.