Assistant Professor Sahar Sharifzadeh awarded $720K to advance field of supramolecular materials

By Alex LaSalvia 

Assistant Professor Sahar Sharifzadeh (ECE, MSE) was awarded funding from the National Science Foundation to develop computational models of bio-inspired materials.

The award of $720K comes through the Center for Complex and Active Materials at the University of California, Irvine, an NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, where Sharifzadeh is a part of an interdisciplinary research group for “Bioinspired Active Materials.” She and her group hope to develop conductive supramolecular materials that self-assemble in response to stimuli.

Assistant Professor Sahar Sharifzadeh (ECE, MSE)

“My group will use first-principles-based simulations to characterize the physical properties of these supramolecular structures and predict new and improved compounds,” Sharifzadeh said.

This award will provide the resources for Sharifzadeh and her team to branch out into biomaterials, which are a more complex class of materials than they have studied so far. She said the funding will strengthen her group’s collaborative scientific environment and allow them to have a more significant impact with their work.

Sharifzadeh is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Division of Materials Science and Engineering and runs The Sharifzadeh Group, which focuses on computational materials science. She received the DOE Early Career Award in 2017, NSF CAREER Award and Boston University College of Engineering Early Career Award in 2019 and was selected as a “Rising Star of Science” by Nature Index in 2018.