Gonella Recieves NFS Career Award

Stefano Gonella received the prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his work on programmable metamaterials. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is the National Science Foundation's most prestigous award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent eduation and the integration of education and research. The award comes with a grant worth $500,000 over a period of five years.

Metamaterials are a new class of synthetic structural materials which, thanks to the intelligent design of their internal architectures, display properties that are not achievable by conventional materials and are far superior to those exhibited by their individual constitutive components. The objective of Gonella's project, "CAREER: ADaptive Acousic Metamaterials with Switchable Funcionality: A Design Platform Enables by Nonlinearity," is to design innovative programmable metamaterials for acoustic and elastic wave control. He is developing metamaterials that can switch back and forth between sets of complementary mechanical functionalities. Ultimately, Gonella and his fellow researchers envision metamaterial architectures that can reconfigure the material's behavior in response to external tuning parameters or autonomously adapt their performance to evolving operational conditions. This study has the potential to impact a number of problems across many fields of engineering, including vibration control, blast protection, sound manipulation, and cloaking of underwater vehicles and structures.