Congratulations to Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) Assistant Professor Rohith Mittapally for receiving the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award from Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU). The award celebrates research skills and professional growth of young faculty members that are full-time assistant professors at ORAU member institutions and are within two years of their tenure track. ORAU sets them up with $5,000 in seed money that is matched by their institution for their research. Research areas include Engineering and Applied Science, Life Sciences, Mathematics/Computer Sciences, Physical Sciences and Policy, Management, or Education.

“For early-career researchers, support like this provides both encouragement and confidence to pursue high-risk, high-reward ideas,” said Mittapally.

Mittapally’s research focuses on addressing energy management challenges with implications in energy conversion and storage and thermal management for small-scale systems. Mittapally’s proposal is “Engineering Interfacial Heat Transport and Chemistry via Polaritonic Coupling.” His research group focuses on controlling heat and energy transport at the nanoscale with a particular emphasis on interfacial phenomena. His work combines nanofabrication techniques with custom-developed precision instruments to study and engineer light-matter interactions at multiple scales. ORAU’s grant and NC State’s institutional match will support the fabrication of nanophotonic structures and the development of experimental techniques to study heat transfer at solid-fluid interfaces.

Mittapally is grateful to have received the Junior Faculty Enhancement award, seeing the recognition as an advancement toward preliminary results that will support other proposals down the line.