Giuseppe Buscarnera Receives Prestigious CAREER Award from NSF
Giuseppe Buscarnera, assistant professor of Civil and Environmental engineering at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, has received a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Buscarnera’s winning proposal was entitled "Mechanics of Geomaterials Exposed to Multi-Physical Perturbations: Innovating Science, Training and Education through Fundamental Principles."
The research objective of Giuseppe Buscarnera’s CAREER project is to gain a fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that deteriorate the mechanical properties of geomaterials subjected to environmental alterations. The findings from the project can benefit the society by supporting the assessment of environmental risks, as well as the forecasting of natural disasters, the management of aging infrastructures, the optimization of energy technologies and the underground storage of hazardous substances. The activities will be integrated with a dedicated educational plan, which will involve a wide range of users, spanning from graduate and undergraduate students to practitioners, local high schools and the general public. The educational activities will be coordinated with OSEP and Searle center at Northwestern and will expose the students to an international collaboration with the Computational Geomechanics group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain.
The CAREER Award is NSF’s most prestigious award for new faculty members. The program recognizes and supports early career development of teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their respective institutions. The minimum award size is $400,000 for a five-year period.
Buscarnera joined Northwestern University in 2011. He has received his MS from Politecnico di Milano and Ph.D from Politecnico di Torino, Italy. During his doctoral and post-doctoral studies he has been awarded with the Rocca Fellowship for research studies at MIT and the PhD Prize of the ALERT Geomaterials association. His research focuses on geomechanical modeling, the theory of material stability, the multiphysics of porous media and the application of geomechanics to landslide hazard zonation and energy geomechanics.