Dayne Swearer Receives DARPA Young Faculty Award

Northwestern Engineering’s Dayne Swearer has received the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award (YFA).

Swearer is an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and an assistant professor of chemistry at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Swearer will receive more than $600,000 over two years.

Swearer’s YFA project is “SPARK: Scattering, Plasma Absorption, and Radiation Knowledge Base,” and officially began on September 1. This project will create new laser-based tools and computational models to better understand plasmas, ionized gases often called the fourth state of matter. Because plasma plays a key role in technologies ranging from semiconductor manufacturing to medical sterilization to satellite propulsion, the research aims to make it easier to measure and predict the complex chemical processes that occur within it.

“We have been fascinated by the unique reactions that are possible with plasma chemistry, such as our recent work on methanol, but have only been able to scratch the surface in measuring the properties of the plasma state that enable these reactions to take place,” Swearer said. “SPARK will be an enabling project for my group, allowing us to perform much deeper plasma characterization and accelerate the pace of discovery.”

Swearer’s research group is a multidisciplinary team spanning physical chemistry, materials science, applied physics, and chemical engineering. The group develops novel catalytic materials and reactor platforms that harness electromagnetic energy, including light and electrified plasmas, to drive selective chemical transformations at interfaces. Combining mechanistic insights from in situ and operando characterization with catalyst and reactor engineering, the group seeks to advance scalable, low-carbon approaches for producing the molecules and materials essential to modern life.

The DARPA YFA program provides high-impact funding, mentoring, and networking connections to elite early-career researchers that enable transformative capabilities in national security through innovative research discovery.