For 2024, 44 Discovery Awards were given to interdisciplinary faculty teams across eleven units of Johns Hopkins. Altogether, the winning project teams—chosen from 286 proposals—include 148 individuals representing 11 Johns Hopkins entities. Four of those individuals are from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, as part of five teams. The Discovery Awards encourage faculty from various disciplines to collaborate in addressing multifaceted challenges and pushing the boundaries of understanding.
Mechanical engineering faculty are highlighted below:
3D-LAMMBS: Data-Driven, Deep Learning Architectures for Multiscale Modeling of Biological Systems – Michael Lapera (Applied Physics Lab), Vicky Nguyen (Engineering) & Somdatta Goswami (Engineering) *Co-Funded with the Data Science and AI Institute*
Advancing Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Informed by Circulating Tumor Cell-Derived Membrane Fragments – Jelani Zarif (Medicine), Claire Hur (Engineering), David Kamson (Medicine) & Stavroula Sofou (Engineering)
Identification of Molecular and Cellular Mechanisms Regulating Sleep Need Using Automated, Selective and Non-stressful Sleep Deprivation in Larval Zebrafish – Seth Blackshaw (Medicine), Claire Hur (Engineering) & Mark Wu (Medicine) *Co-Funded with the OneNeuro Initiative*
Infrastructure Climate Adaptation/Resiliency in the US (ICARUS) – Marisel Villafane-Delgado (Applied Physics Lab), Yuri Dvorkin (Engineering), Dennice Gayme (Engineering), Enrique Mallada (Engineering), Rebecca Eager (Applied Physics Lab), Krista Rand (Applied Physics Lab), Jared Markowitz (Applied Physics Lab) & Valerie Washington (Applied Physics Lab) *Co-Funded with the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute*
Modeling the Dynamic Nucleocytoskeletal Interface in Cycling Cells – Karen Reddy (Medicine), Sean Sun (Engineering)