Two Women Scientists Named Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellows by the U.S. Department of Defense

The U.S. Department of Defense has announced the selection of nine distinguished faculty scientists and engineers for the 2022 Class of Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellows. This highly competitive fellowship is named in honor of Vannevar Bush, who directed the Office of Scientific Research and Development after World War II.

Each Fellow will receive up to $3 million over the five-year fellowship term to pursue cutting-edge fundamental research projects. “The Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship is the department’s most prestigious research grant award,” said Jean-Luc Cambier, the program’s director. “It is oriented towards bold and ambitious ‘blue sky’ research that will lead to extraordinary outcomes that may revolutionize entire disciplines, create entirely new fields, or disrupt accepted theories and perspectives.”

Of the nine new fellows, only two are women.

Jelena Vuckovic is the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership and holds the Fortinet Founders Chair in the department of electrical engineering at Stanford University. She was named an assistant professor at Stanford in 2003 and was named a full professor in 2013. Dr. Vuckovic is a graduate of the University of Nis in Serbia. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. Her Department of Defense research project is entitled “Scalable Generation and Control of Large Quantum States of Light and Matter in Engineered Semiconductor Materials.”

Sharon Glotzer is the Anthony C. Lembke chair of the department of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan. She is also the John Werner Cahn Distinguished University Professor of Engineering and the Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering. She joined the faculty in 2001. Her research focuses on manipulating matter at the molecular, nanoparticle, and colloidal level to create “designer” structures. Dr. Glotzer holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Ph.D. in physics from Boston University. Her project is entitled “On the Nature of the Entropic Bond.”