Researchers Win Five Years of Support from New Multidisiplinary Research Program

A collaborative effort between MechSE professors Daniel Tortorelli and Alexander Vakakis and researchers at the California Institute of Technology was recently awarded almost $1.5 million per year in funding from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) via its Multidisciplinary University Research Inititiative (MURI) program. The award will provide five years of support for the CalTech MechSE project, which involves the design of adaptive load mitigating materials using nonlinear stress wave tailoring.

DOD's MURI program supports research by teams of investigators from more than one traditional science and engineering discipline. The program is highly competitive; all told, the Army Research Office (ARO), the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) solicited proposals in 32 topics and received a total of 152 proposals. Based proposals selected during the fiscal 2009 competition, a total of 69 academic institutions are expected to participate in 41 research efforts. Because MURI awards are for a five-year period, they provided greater sustained support than single-investigator awards for the education and training of students who are pursuing advanced degrees in science and engineering fields that are critical to the DOD.