UTC mechanical engineering professor Murat Barisik receives prestigious NSF CAREER Award

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Murat Barisik joined the UTC faculty in 2022.

Dr. Murat Barisik, assistant professor in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Department of Mechanical Engineering and a leading researcher in nanoscale heat transfer, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Presented annually to early-career faculty across the country who are seen as emerging leaders in research and education, the NSF CAREER program is among the most competitive and prestigious awards offered by the agency. Barisik’s five-year grant—totaling $501,760—will support his project, “Multiscale characterization of heat transfer in nanoporous materials assisted by machine learning.”

Barisik is the third UTC mechanical engineering professor to land an NSF CAREER Award in recent years, joining UC Foundation Associate Professor Trevor Elliott (2021) and Associate Professor Hamdy Ibrahim (2024). Overall, he is the sixth UTC faculty member to receive this prestigious recognition.

The NSF began the CAREER awards program in 1994.

“CAREER awards are highly competitive and an important peer-recognition of accomplishments and future potential of impact for early career faculty,” Vice Chancellor for Research Reinhold Mann said. “We are excited about Dr. Barisik joining this group of individuals at UTC.”

Barisik’s project will explore how customizable nanoporous materials—such as aerogels, which are composed of 99% air and are among the best-known insulators—can be better understood and optimized to improve energy efficiency across a wide range of applications. Although these materials offer immense promise, their complex nanoscale structure has made it difficult to predict or control their heat transfer behavior.

By utilizing molecular dynamics simulations and integrating machine learning techniques, Barisik’s research aims to unlock these nanoscale mechanisms and create reliable models that predict how structural properties influence thermal performance. The insights will extend beyond aerogels to other functional materials such as metal-organic frameworks, powder beds, and metamaterials.

“This is an important milestone. I’ve been developing multiscale and multiphysics modeling tools to better understand and advance nanotechnology applications, and these experiences have brought me to this point. I’m glad that the CAREER award validated that we are on the right track,” said Barisik, who joined the UTC faculty in 2022.

“This project builds on the idea of understanding behavior at the nanoscale, enabling us to tailor nanoporous materials with precision. We are not just modeling materials. We are teaching algorithms to discover the next generation of materials.”

The NSF-funded research has the potential to save billions in energy costs and contribute to the development of sustainable technologies in clean energy, medicine, agriculture and aerospace. Additionally, the grant will support educational outreach and STEM workforce development, including hands-on research opportunities for UTC undergraduate and graduate students.

“Dr. Barisik’s research in nanoengineering and technology is transformative and has broad applications in fields such as material science, clean energy generation and storage, medicine and aerospace—among many others,” said Dr. James C. Newman, professor and head of UTC’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Furthermore, Dr. Barisik’s career goals and passion to advance research as well as attracting more students to the STEM professions precisely align with the missions of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the College of Engineering and Computer Science.

“His technical prowess, his energy and enthusiasm, his willingness to openly collaborate and his collegiality make Dr. Barisik an exceptional faculty member and a wonderful colleague.”

The CAREER award was made through the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (NSF 22-586) and is managed under the agency’s Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems (CBET) division.

Barisik’s project also supports UTC’s growing research enterprise and strategic goal of advancing toward R2 “high research activity” status in the Carnegie Classification system.

No stranger to collaborative work, Barisik’s research will also benefit from the involvement of undergraduate and graduate researchers, with a total of 15 student positions supported by the award budget.

“We want to build a strong future workforce that will be fluent in working in high-tech jobs,” Barisik said, “and we will be encouraging engineering students to further discover these upcoming technologies.

“I am pretty sure these new graduates will be going to work on nanomaterials and with AI much more than past generations. This research will increase their critical thinking and show them how they can use these tools and new technologies in high-tech jobs.”

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Here is the list of UTC’s NSF CAREER grant recipients:

Dr. Hope Klug, biology (2016)—CAREER: The Operation of Sexual Selection Revisited
Dr. Hong Qin, computer science (2016)—CAREER: A probabilistic gene network model of cellular aging and its application on the conserved lifespan extension mechanisms of dietary restriction
Dr. Eleni Panagiotou, mathematics (2021)—CAREER: Entanglement of active polymers
Dr. Trevor Elliott, mechanical engineering (2021)—CAREER: Control of Additively Manufactured Solid Rocket Fuel Grain Geometries and Combustion Analysis
Dr. Hamdy Ibrahim, mechanical engineering (2024)—CAREER: Hybrid Surface Coating Toward Corrosion-Controlled Magnesium-Based Implants
Dr. Murat Barisik, mechanical engineering (2025)—CAREER: Multiscale characterization of heat transfer in nanoporous materials assisted by machine learning