December 4, 2024 Ying Li recognized with ASME Rising Star award Written By: Caitlin Scott Departments: Mechanical Engineering Categories: Awards|Faculty Mechanical Engineering Associate Professor Ying Li recently received an ASME Rising Star in Mechanical Engineering Award! The award recognizes “innovative work and dedication that significantly advances the engineering profession and inspires the next generation of engineers.” “Rising star” honorees have previously received federal support through prestigious research programs, such as NSF CAREER, AFOSR YIP, ONR YIP, DARPA YFA, etc. Li received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his “Machine Learned Coarse-grained Modeling for Mechanics of Thermoplastic Elastomers,” research that quantifies the link between synthesis, microstructure, and mechanical properties of thermoplastic elastomers. He has also received the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award for “Deep Reinforcement Learning for de novo Thermosetting Polymer Design”, which furthers his research in computational modeling and design of novel polymers for extreme conditions with the help of machine learning techniques. The Rising Stars Awards were presented at the International Mechanical Engineering Celebration and Showcase on November 19, part of the 2024 International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE) in Portland, Oregon. IMECE, ASME’s flagship annual event, brings together researchers from academia, government, and industry to share innovations across engineering disciplines. Additionally, Li’s Laboratory for Polymer Digital Engineering, just published an interesting study, titled “Targeting the Weak Spot: Preferential Disruption of Bacterial Poles by Janus Nanoparticles” in Nano Letters, a flagship journal in nanoscience and nanotechnology. Congratulations!