DARPA Director's Fellowship Award Goes to Suo Yang
ME Assistant Professor Suo Yang has been awarded the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director's Fellowship, an extremely selective award given to top performers in the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) pool. Yang's YFA project seeks to deliver a revolutionary hypersonic boom theory, advancing research in that field for the first time since the 1970s. Particularly, Yang’s group has been developing the very first theory and its software to predict sonic boom rapidly and accurately for lifting bodies at hypersonic speeds (Mach 5+). This tool can assist the low-boom design for hypersonic lifting bodies to protect people's safety and health.
Of recent YFA recipients, only awardees who demonstrate exceptional project performance receive the Director's Fellowship, which provides an additional year of funding based on the researcher's performance during the previous two years. Yang will attend the awards ceremony, which will be hosted at DARPA headquarters in Arlington, VA, on October 30, 2023. He is the only researcher at the University of Minnesota to receive a 2023 Director's Fellowship.