Prineha Narang Receives Award from the Office of Naval Research

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Prof. Prineha Narang

Professor Prineha Narang recently received The Office of Naval Research Young Investigator’s Program Award (ONR YIP) for her work on transport in materials.

Established in 1985, the ONR YIP is one of the nation’s oldest and most selective basic-research, early-career awards in science and technology. Its purpose is to fund academic researchers whose scientific pursuits show outstanding promise for supporting the Department of Defense, while also promoting their professional development. Twenty-five recipients will share nearly $17.5 million in funding to conduct innovative scientific research that will benefit science and technology for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Narang’s project, Enabling Dissipation-Less Electronics with Hydrodynamic Transport in Materials was awarded $750,000 over a three-year period. Her work seeks to harness a fundamental understanding of electron and phonon transport in functional materials to design and optimize new dissipation-less devices for power and energy technology.

Transport phenomena, the irreversible processes driving physical systems towards equilibrium, underpin much of the complexity of the natural world. The transfer of charge, heat, and spin in materials is governed by transport processes. Therefore, functional control of materials relies on an understanding of these processes, making transport an essential ingredient of energy technologies, electronic device design, and optimization of power systems. Enabled by this support from ONR, Narang’s group will demonstrate a theoretical and computational framework for spatially-resolved coupled transport calculations of electrons and phonons. Building on the NarangLab’s work on transport in quantum materials, they will introduce architectures for dissipation-less electronic devices that leverage hydrodynamics, the collective flow of electrons in materials akin to classical fluids, and unconventional transport phenomena.

Narang joined us in July 2022. Previously she was on the Harvard faculty, was an Environmental Fellow at HUCE, and worked as a research scholar in condensed matter theory in the Department of Physics at MIT. Narang’s research group (the NarangLab) works at the vibrant intersection of theoretical and computational science, phenomena away from equilibrium, and predictions of dynamical correlations in matter. She received an M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Caltech. Narang’s work has been recognized by many awards and special designations, including the 2022 Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award from the Materials Research Society, Mildred Dresselhaus Prize, Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Max Planck Award from the Max Planck Society, and the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics all in 2021, an NSF CAREER Award in 2020, being named a Moore Inventor Fellow by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for pioneering innovations in quantum science, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a Top Innovator by MIT Tech Review (MIT TR35), and a leading young scientist by the World Economic Forum in 2018.