Cory Windorff, assistant professor of inorganic chemistry at New Mexico State University, is one of 93 early career scientists across the country selected to receive a combined total of $135 million in research funding from the U.S. Department of Energy for a wide range of topics.
The 2023 Early Career Research Program awardees represent 47 universities and 12 DOE national laboratories. Windorff’s grant is among a handful received through the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).
The DOE funding will provide $875,000 over the next five years to support Windorff’s research proposal titled “Probing Electronic Structure in Actinide-Transition Metal Nitride Clusters.”
“It’s important to understand the electronic structure of metals so we can design more efficient catalysts for industrial processes,” Windorff said. “We can look at activating molecules like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide or nitrogen and that can help to give us synthetic fuels or ammonia. These are very big in industrial processes. What we find could be a different way to access those.”
Windorff also points to opportunities to build better magnets, which allow us to shrink hard drives to microscopic levels or could have potential impact on medical devices such as MRIs.
“MRIs are great, but they require liquid helium to work and liquid helium is getting more and more scarce each year,” Windorff said. “If we can find different magnetic materials, maybe we will not need to use liquid helium for those.”
The awards are part of the DOE Office of Science’s Early Career Research Program, which bolsters the nation’s scientific workforce by supporting exceptional researchers at the outset of their careers. Awardees were selected based on peer review by outside scientific experts. Since its inception in 2010, the Early Career Research Program has made 868 awards, with 564 awards to university researchers and 304 awards to national lab researchers.
Windorff looks forward to strengthening connections with Sandia and Los Alamos National Labs while training students to work in these high-demand careers. The grant will allow Windorff to hire a post-doctoral researcher and two graduate students as well as offer summer research opportunities for NMSU undergraduates.
“What excites me is that I can help train students to go work at national labs, especially local students or regional students who want to stay in the region,” Windorff said. “They can work with some of these elements, engage in research of these types of problems and find jobs in New Mexico.”
Another of Windorff’s goals under the grant includes a facility where researchers can work with some elements heavier than uranium.
“We proposed to start building some of those facilities and to partner with other facilities that work with these elements,” Windorff said. “There are only a handful of these facilities across the U.S. and very few across the West. It would be a unique capability for us to have one here at NMSU.”
The full article can be seen at:
https://newsroom.nmsu.edu/news/nmsu-chemistry-professor-receives-2023-doe-early-career-award/s/c49d137a-3878-460a-9ea2-f2d85e287e89