Thevamaran lands 2022 NASA Early Career Faculty Award

Engineering Physics Assistant Professor Ramathasan Thevamaran has received a 2022 NASA Early Career Faculty Award.

The award will support his work developing advanced composite materials with exceptional mechanical properties and thermal stability for dimensionally stable structural components to be used in future large telescopes and space structures.

These new telescopes, which would be larger than the James Webb Space Telescope, and space structures could help NASA discover habitable exoplanets.

Thevamaran’s research focuses on the computationally guided design, scalable fabrication, thermo-mechanical characterizations, and prototype demonstration of lightweight structured composites with extreme mechanical and thermal properties. He aims to identify and establish clear process-structure-property relations in nanofiber-reinforced composites with high-performance interphases that will allow researchers to overcome material property conflicts to achieve ultra-high modulus, strength and toughness, and ultra-low coefficient of thermal expansion and creep rates.

The award challenges outstanding early career faculty researchers to examine the theoretical feasibility of ideas and approaches that are critical to making science, space travel and exploration more effective, affordable and sustainable.