- Five UCF faculty won 2025 NSF CAREER awards totaling about $3 million over five years, including two grants transferred to UCF with newly hired researchers.
- Funded projects span van der Waals semiconductor integration, AI-assisted UI engineering, physics-informed ML for cyber-physical systems, hydrogel-based 3D printing of rare-earth magnets, and adaptive chip architectures for AI workloads.
- The awards ($477k0697k each) strengthen UCFs interdisciplinary footprint across semiconductors, AI hardware/software, and sustainable materials aligned with national tech priorities.
- Real-world impact hinges on prototyping, commercialization, and industrial partnerships amid scale-up, supply-chain, and materials constraints.
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The University of Central Florida’s 2025 NSF CAREER awards demonstrate a coherent strategic push across several frontier technology domains. Each grant aligns with national priorities—AI, semiconductors, renewable energy, sustainability—while showcasing UCF’s ability to recruit new faculty (e.g. Lei, Nghiem) and amplify its existing strengths (Moran, Shen, Zheng). These investments are sizable, ranging from just under $500,000 to nearly $700,000, reflecting mid-scale foundational work intended for both academic and application-driven outcomes.
Examining the projects more closely reveals UCF is targeting both materials-level innovations (Van der Waals semiconductors, rare earth permanent magnets) and system-level solutions (Physics-informed machine learning for dynamic systems; AI-enabled tools for UI engineering; polymorphic chip architecture). This dual-track always carries risk: materials R&D often stagnates in scaling up from lab to production, while system-level AI applications face performance, data availability, and model bias concerns. UCF’s institutional support—evidenced by its NanoScience Technology Center, CECS teaching/research culture, and the Office of Technology Transfer—helps mitigate these risks by providing infrastructure and pathways to commercialization.
Strategically, these grants enhance UCF’s profile in fast-growing fields and position the university as a player attractive to recruitment, funding, and partnerships. Lei’s work on 3D integration of Van der Waals semiconductors could bridge gaps in flexible electronics and wearable tech; Shen’s hydrogel-based 3D printing may disrupt rare earth supply chains—a critical issue given geopolitical constraints; Zheng’s polymorphic chip architecture is pointed at current bottlenecks in AI hardware scalability.
Open questions remain: how quickly can UCF translate these projects into prototypes and patents? What industrial collaborations (semiconductor fabs, rare earth producers, AI hardware firms) are in play or possible? Are there supply chain or regulatory risks (e.g. for rare earth elements)? Also, sustaining infrastructure (clean rooms, prototyping, materials acquisition) will be essential—and costly. UCF may need to cultivate further external partnerships or consortia to scale these developments.
Supporting Notes
- Five faculty recipients: Sidong Lei, Truong Nghiem, Kevin Moran, Wen Shen, Hao Zheng.
- Total NSF CAREER funding for these projects: approximately $3 million over five years.
- Individual awards include:
– Sidong Lei: $516,085 over five years; $449,136 over first three years at UCF.
– Kevin Moran: $582,308 over five years.
– Truong Nghiem: $477,585 over five years.
– Wen Shen: $697,264 over five years.
– Hao Zheng: $550,000 over five years. - Areas of research: van der Waals semiconductor integration; automated semantic screen understanding for UI; composite physics-informed learning for dynamic systems; 3D printing of rare earth permanent magnets; polymorphic chip architecture for irregular and sparse computations.
- Two awardees transferred their projects to UCF (Lei and Nghiem), illustrating UCF’s ability to attract researchers with active grants.
- Since FY1995, nearly 100 UCF faculty have secured NSF CAREER grants, bringing in over $40 million in research funding.