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Pavana Prabhakar

Prabhakar earns Defense Department grant to examine materials under extreme heat

Pavana Prabhakar, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and Charles G. Salmon Fellow of Structural Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will develop a system for studying how materials degrade under extreme heat through a new U.S. Department of Defense grant.

Prabhakar is among 185 researchers across the country to receive a grant through the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program.

She plans to use the $256,565 grant to create what she calls an integrated system for ultra-high temperature exposure of materials. Such a system would allow her to conduct basic research to understand how ceramic and other composite materials fail in an extreme environment.