Faculty Tribute 2021 - Research Grants

Researcher Statements:

Lead PI: Amy McGovern
School of Computer Computer Science, Gallogly College of Engineering; and School of Meteorology, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences

Amy McGovern is a Lloyd G. and Joyce Austin Presidential Professor in the School of Computer Science, Gallogly College of Engineering, and School of Meteorology, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences. Also the director of the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography, she conducts research on developing and applying trustworthy AI and machine learning methods, primarily for severe weather phenomena. McGovern’s various awards and honors include being elected as an American Meteorological Society Fellow (2020); serving as an Inaugural Member of the American Meteorological Society Culture and Inclusion Cabinet (2020 – present) and as vice chair of the AMS’s committee on Artificial Intelligence and its Applications to Environmental Science (2018-2021); and an NSF CAREER Award (2008-2015).  

Co-PI: Dimitrios Diochnos
School of Computer Science, Gallogly College of Engineering

Dimitrios Diochnos, assistant professor of computer science, researches the mathematical foundations of machine learning. He is also interested in artificial intelligence at large and in particular in applications of knowledge-based systems to automated reasoning. His work has appeared in such top conferences as NeurIPS, ALT and FUN, and in respected journals, including Information Processing Letters and Journal of Symbolic Computation. He has served as a member of the program committee in major artificial intelligence venues such as Neural Information Processing Systems, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Since 2012 he has served as the publicity chair for the biennial International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. He is a co-editor on a special issue of the Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence journal, devoted to the International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics in 2018. In 2004, he served as a member of the international scientific committee for the International Olympiad in Informatics. 

Co-PI: Andrew Fagg
School of Computer Science and Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Science and Technology, Gallogly College of Engineering

Andrew H. Fagg, associate professor of computer science and Brian E. and Sandra O’Brien Presidential Professor, Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Science and Technology, Gallogly College of Engineering, focuses his research on the relationships between biological systems and machines. In this area of symbiotic computing, he studies the interaction of humans with machines, machines as models of biological systems and biological systems as inspiration for new robot control and learning techniques. Specific areas of interest include motor skill learning in robots and models of primate skill learning, where he specifically works in the areas of reaching, grasping and manipulation; and complex human movement generation and how behavior changes under development and learning.

His current foci include the development of infant crawling skills for typically developing infants and infants who are at risk for cerebral palsy. He also studies gait generation in lower limb amputees and the interplay of multiple learning systems, including supervised- and reinforcement-style learning algorithms. In machine learning, his lab developed a learning algorithm for learning relational concepts rooted in data sets that involve large numbers of attributed, heterogeneous objects; they also employ a range of machine learning tools in their data analysis, modeling and robotics work. Fagg designs brain-machine interfaces for advanced prosthetic devices, working on techniques for translating the activity of small populations of neurons into control signals for robotic devices. In the area of assistive robotics, his team developed a robot assistant that helps children at risk for cerebral palsy learn how to crawl. 

Co-PI: Cameron Homeyer
School of Meteorology, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences

Cameron Homeyer, associate professor, Chesapeake Energy Professor of Climate Systems Science and associate director for Graduate Programs, School of Meteorology, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences, lists among his research interests radar meteorology, the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, and climate. He is one of the leading scientists for the NASA research project, The Dynamics and Chemistry of the Summer Stratosphere.

He also leads the Convection, Chemistry, and Climate research group at OU. This group’s research falls within three topic areas of atmospheric science: Radar & Satellite Meteorology, Upper Troposphere and Lower Stratosphere studies, and Climate Variability and Change. Many of the topics that the CCC group works on are cross-cutting in that they require and contribute to knowledge in more than one of these areas. For example, thunderstorms are capable of reaching the tropopause: the boundary between the lowest layer of the atmosphere and that in which we live (the troposphere) and the layer immediately above (the stratosphere). If a storm overshoots the tropopause and extends into the stratosphere, it may lead to transport of air between the two layers (stratosphere-troposphere exchange or STE). STE affects the composition of the UTLS, which in turn leads to changes in the radiation budget and climate. Studying such problems enables the CCC group to broadly impact the atmospheric sciences. CCC group research is/has been previously supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Co-PI: Henry Neeman
Information Technology and Supercomputing Center for Education and Research

Henry Neeman holds numerous titles at OU: assistant vice president for Information Technology; director, OU Supercomputer Center for Education and Research; adjunct associate professor, School of Computer Science, Gallogly College of Engineering; and research scientist, Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms.

Neeman’s research interests in high-performance computing, scientific computing, parallel and distributed computing, structured adaptive mesh refinement, scientific visualization, grid computing, and computer science education. As the director of the OU Supercomputing Center for Education and Research, he leads a unique partnership among the OU Department of Information Technology, the OU Vice President for Research and Partnerships, and 23 academic departments from the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, Engineering, Geosciences and Medicine, as well as several research centers, institutes and support organizations. He is also a founding member and de facto chair of the OU High Performance Computing group.

In addition to his own teaching and research, Neeman collaborates with about 20 OU research teams per semester, applying high performance computing techniques in fields such as numerical weather prediction, bioinformatics and genomics, data mining, high energy physics, cosmology, nanotechnology, petroleum reservoir management, river basin modeling and engineering optimization.  

Co-PI: Nathan Snook
Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms, National Weather Center

Nathan Snook serves as director of research and is senior research scientist at the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms, National Weather Center. He currently is serving on the Council of Fellows for the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies.

Researcher Statements:

Lead PI: Mark Yeary
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

Mark Yeary is a Hudson-Torchmark Presidential Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering and PI of a $7.4 million grant awarded from the U.S. Office of Naval Research to fund the development of a scanner and innovative digital radar solutions to support research, prototyping and testing of advanced digital radar concepts for the Navy and the U.S. Department of Defense. The project will also make OU home to the largest university-based scanner for near-field measurements in the nation, and most probably the world. In brief, a near-field scanner is an indoor antenna measurement system that is used to conduct high-accuracy antenna characterizations and provides essential support for radar before being deployed in the field, including reduced detection times and improved targeting precision. The U.S. Navy faces a number of significant obstacles in the near future, and the goal of this teamwork-based project is to develop accurate radar solutions for target detection, imaging and communication made possible by a near-field scanner, advanced array calibration techniques, tunable filter designs, combined filter plus antenna designs (filtenna), support multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) experiments, and array resource management. The fine-scale granularity of a near-field antenna scanner is needed to support research, prototyping and testing of these advanced digital radar concepts.

The three-year project will create the largest near-field scanner in the nation at a university, to be housed at OU’s Advanced Radar Research Center. The face of the scanner will be 20-feet-by-20-feet and will enable OU to characterize its large mobile phased array radar systems, which are currently under development, prior to participation in joint experiments with the U.S. Department of Defense. The capabilities this funding will enable will put OU and ARRC at the top nationally with helping the Navy study the advantages of digital phased array radars. In summary, the overarching goal is to build a state-of-the-art measurement system and to host its supporting experiments to enhance the nation’s security and train the next generation of students.

Co-PI: Caleb Fulton
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

While the year 2020 will likely (and justifiably) live in infamy in the hearts of many, it is one for which I will be eternally grateful. After nearly losing my life in a motorcycle accident in October of 2019, I returned in a pandemic-garbled professor role in early 2020 to a community of students, faculty, professional engineers and staff who, with open (but mostly virtual) arms, made it feel to me like a year of rebirth. I got a new laptop to replace the one that was broken in the accident. I got news of new funding to pursue a project that resonates with personal experiences and losses from more than a decade ago. The Digital Array Radar (DAR) system, a single subarray that I built in 2010 for my Ph.D. at Purdue, planted seeds and generated ideas that I brought to OU, leading to the development of the Horus all-digital phased array, starting in roughly 2015.

In 2020, these seeds sprouted into a single Horus subarray that radiated and received for the first time, and it is growing today into the system(s) that it will ultimately become. These archetypal “rebirths” came as direct or tangential results of the numerous long-term, multidisciplinary and multi-level projects in which I have been a PI or CO-PI in the last eight years. However, it is the aforementioned community’s dedication to doing the actual hard work that has kept these developments going. Witnessing this work has ultimately rekindled within me the passion for engineering science that brought me to this field to begin with, and the receipt of this Annual Award for Excellence in Research Grants is a welcome affirmation of my own efforts.

Co-PI: Nathan A. Goodman
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering, and Advanced Radar Research Center

Nathan A. Goodman, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering, and director of research at the Advanced Radar Research Center, has served as technical co-chair for the 2011 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Radar Conference, finance chair for the 2012 Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop and general co-chair for the 2018 IEEE Radar Conference held in Oklahoma City. He was a lecturer for the NATO SET-216 lecture series on Cognition and Radar Sensing, which presented lectures on cognitive radar in 10 cities across North America and Europe. Goodman has also served as a co-chair for the NATO SET-227 research task group on Cognitive Radar and as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. He currently serves as chair of the IEEE Aerospace & Electronic Systems Society’s Radar Systems Panel.

Goodman’s research interests cover a variety of topics in radar and array signal processing, including radar imaging, adaptive filtering, target detection and tracking, multistatic and MIMO radar systems, cognitive radar, and waveform optimization. He has developed algorithms for synthetic aperture imaging from distributed platforms, optimized waveforms for target recognition, cognitive control of beam scanning and radar waveform parameters, and other applications. He is currently developing techniques for efficient and optimal use of the beamforming agility enabled by digital arrays. His research has been funded by Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Office of Naval Research, Army Research Laboratory, Missile Defense Agency, NASA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and a variety of industry partners.

Co-PI: Jay McDaniel
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

Modern-day radar systems continuously demand more flexibility while simultaneously satisfying unprecedented cost, size, weight and power constraints. These demands are due to the ever-increasing desire for airborne and space-borne implementations, system reconfigurability to achieve multiple missions with a single radar platform, and the use of distrusted radar sensors in a coherent network to push the state-of-the-art in multiple industries, including remote sensing, defense and telecommunications. Overcoming traditional limitations will require transformative technologies from the component-level up to the systems-level as well as innovative systems-of-systems approaches.

Jay McDaniel, assistant professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering, conducts research that focuses on disrupting the status quo by “thinking outside of the box” to propel over technological hurdles associated with the current research landscape around radar sensors. This includes research on highly integrated and low-loss filtering solutions for high dynamic range radio frequency and millimeter-wave transceivers, novel multi-inertial measurement unit fusion techniques for fine-resolution and highly accurate position, navigation, and timing in synthetic aperture radar imaging, and fusion-based state estimation techniques for localization and synchronization of distributed radar sensor networks.

His research interests also include ultra-wideband and polarimetric radar systems, electromagnetic modeling and co-simulation, microwave engineering, and all digital-at-every-element phased array system architectures and packaging. Examples of ongoing research projects include frequency-agile and loss-programmable RF electronics in high-dynamic-range system architectures; air-suspended and miniaturized filter integration into digital-at-every-element radar systems; and hardware and PNT development/integration for deployment on small unmanned aerial vehicle systems for SAR imaging. Other research projects focus on multi-IMU fusion techniques for reduced C-SWaP airborne and space-borne applications; calibration and clutter cancellation techniques for accurate wideband radar cross-section extraction; and fusion-based state estimation for autonomous localization and synchronization of distributed sensors for high-gain beamforming and SAR imaging applications.

Co-PI: Justin Metcalf
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

The electromagnetic spectrum is a finite resource with an exponentially increasing demand. In particular, the internet of things and 4G/5G networks have placed an incredible strain on the spectrum. Traditional radar system design and processing strategies were based on strictly defined, static requirements. These siloed designs are unable to cope with the fast-moving requirements and capabilities of the telecommunications industry. Recently, emerging radio frequency software defined radio systems have provided a new capability to literally program the spectrum. Therefore, rather than designing a “radar” or a “communication” device, we can program one device to manipulate the spectrum based on the users’ dynamically changing needs. The key question is then what to do with this flexibility? How do we manage this newfound freedom?

Justin Metcalf is an assistant professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering, whose primary research focus is on innovative signal processing and machine learning techniques that take advantage of flexible, software defined apertures. This includes research on designing innovative strategies to access the spectrum, such as dual-function radar/communication waveforms, cognitive radar, resource management algorithms, spectrum deconfliction techniques for automotive radars, and new information-theoretic expressions for spectral utility. He is also examining new techniques to process the data obtained by these sensors, with a focus on enabling radars and communication networks to share the same spectrum. Along these lines, he is examining adaptive radar detection algorithms and ML techniques to deal with the extreme amount of data generated by these sensors. Along with his interests in techniques exploiting SDRs, he is exploring new ML techniques fusing data obtained from optical and automotive radar sensors to improve the reliability of autonomous driving in degraded conditions (e.g., black ice, fog, etc.). In addition to the more traditional radar signal processing/machine learning applications, he is also exploring biomedical imaging radar and quantum radar technologies.

Co-PI: Robert Palmer
School of Meteorology, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences

Robert D. Palmer, a professor and Tommy C. Craighead Chair in the School of Meteorology, and associate vice president for research and partnerships, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences, served from 1989 to 1991 as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellow with the Radio Atmospheric Science Center, Kyoto University, Japan, where his major accomplishment was the development of novel interferometric radar techniques for studies of atmospheric turbulent layers.

While at OU, where he also serves as executive director of the interdisciplinary Advanced Radar Research Center, Palmer’s research interests have focused on the application of advanced radar signal processing techniques to observations of severe weather, particularly related to phased-array radars and other innovative system designs. He has published widely in the area of radar remote sensing of the atmosphere, with over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, 30 international invited talks and more than 300 conference presentations. His research has an emphasis on generalized imaging problems, spatial filter design and clutter mitigation using advanced array/signal processing techniques. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and has been the recipient of several awards for both his teaching and research accomplishments. 

Co-PI: Jessica Ruyle
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

Jessica Ruyle, associate professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering, is a member of the Advanced Radar Research Center at OU. She earned her bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, in 2006, and both her master of science and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008 and 2011, respectively. Her research interests are in the development and characterization of new electromagnetic devices and platforms such as antennas and packaging to improve the performance of radiating systems in challenging environments. She is the recipient of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award for her work in highly conformal, placement-insensitive antennas. She is also an IEEE Senior Member.

Co-PI: Jorge Salazar Cerreño
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

Since joining the OU faculty in 2015, I have been fortunate to collaborate with very talented individuals who created a synergy that enabled securing funding for research in cutting-edge technology for radar communication systems. Grant funding allowed me to expand my research in phased array antennas, and through that research, to further my mission of creating advanced systems to improve on existing technology in the areas of weather and military radar that will enhance the protection of human life. These grants allowed me to create a Phased Array Antenna Research and Development Group, which has its mission to develop state-of-the-art improvements for current radar technology that is critical for weather and military applications. PAARD has graduated 11 undergraduates, six M.S. and five Ph.D. students, and two postdocs in the six years I have been at OU.

During my six years at OU, I have had the opportunity to develop new technology that enhanced phased array antennas and communication systems. Designing new components, sub-systems and radar architectures to improve or solve a problem is quite important in our research community. In the past five years, communication technology has evolved rapidly, requiring new devices that provide better performance in retrieving large amounts of data. Using a higher portion of the spectrum is attractive for large channel capacity; however, the challenges associated with high frequencies make the research difficult. Addressing the evolving technological needs, my team is exploring exploiting higher frequencies (40 GHz to 100 GHz) intended for use in the front-end design of automobile radars and is investigating the use of even higher frequencies (100 GHz to 300 GHz) for the future generation of communication systems (6G).

Co-PI: Hjalti Sigmarsson
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

To meet the ever-growing demand for higher data rates and the envisioned, widespread connectivity for the internet of things (IoT), an increase in the available bandwidths and operating frequencies of devices is necessary. The next generation of high-frequency communications and radar systems will require unprecedented agility to allow for efficient utilization of the radio frequency spectrum. Achieving this agility will require intelligent and autonomous spectral sharing methods. One of the challenges is the implementation of high-frequency hardware that is capable of sensing and identifying available spectrum and adjusting its operation to avoid interference.

Associate Professor Hjalti Sigmarsson’s research in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering, focuses on advancing the state-of-the-art in reconfigurable hardware at RF and microwave frequencies, which will be critical for the operation of these agile future systems. It includes research on tunable filters and antennas, high-efficiency and high-power amplifiers, adaptive matching networks, simultaneous transmit and receive techniques, and reconfigurable hardware integration in integrated circuits. His research interests also include spectral management schemes for cognitive radio architectures, closed-loop feedback control for tunable devices, advanced packaging, component miniaturization and the utilization of various rapid prototyping methods to realize electromagnetic structures.

Examples of ongoing research projects include miniaturized filter integration into digital-at-every-element radar systems and investigation of the system-level performance improvements that available through interference mitigation; hardware and waveform improvements to an airborne synthetic aperture radar in preparation for space deployment; development of filtering antenna arrays for high-power, agile radar systems; and hardware development for SAR deployment on small unmanned aerial systems.

Researcher Statements:

Lead PI: Randy Peppler
Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences

Randy Peppler, a lecturer in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences, who also serves as associate director of the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies, focuses his research on local knowledge of weather and climate, particularly related to how such knowledge is used in agriculture and for tornado risk perception. Peppler also is the manager of the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program Data Quality Office.

Co-PI: Kenneth Kehoe
Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies

Kenneth Kehoe is a research associate in the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies at the University of Oklahoma. 

Researcher Statements:

Lead PI: Jeff Basara

School of Meteorology, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences

Jeff Basara is an associate professor in the School of Meteorology, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences, and an associate professor, School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, Gallogly College of Engineering. He also serves as the executive associate director of the Hydrology and Water Security program and leads the Climate Hydrology Ecosystems Weather Research Group. His research activities focus on weather and climate extremes and associated impacts across scales spanning local to global. This includes the rapid intensification of drought (also referred to as “flash" drought), drought monitoring and detection, and drought persistence. Additionally, his research focuses on the causes, drivers, and impacts of excessive precipitation and (flash) floods, land-atmosphere interactions, heatwaves, severe weather, urban meteorology and severe winter weather. Of particular interest are the environmental processes that yield compound and cascading impacts which lead to and exacerbate extreme weather and climate events.

Lead PI: Hank Jenkins-Smith
Department of Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences; Center for Energy, Security and Society; and National Institute for Risk and Resilience

Hank Jenkins-Smith is a George Lynn Cross Research Professor in the Department of Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences, and also serves as co-director of both the National Institute for Risk and Resilience and the Center for Risk and Crisis Management. He has published books and articles on public policy, national security, natural disasters, and energy and environmental policy. He has served on National Research Council Committees, as an elected member on the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement, and as a member of the governing Council of the American Political Science Association.

Jenkins-Smith’s research focuses on theories of the public policy change, with particular emphasis on the management (and mismanagement) of controversial issues involving high-risk perceptions on the part of the public. He is the science co-lead (with Carol Silva) on a five-year NSF study focusing on finding sustainable solutions to the complex problems at the intersection of weather, water, land cover and infrastructure in Oklahoma. He is also the co-PI on an NSF grant for a year-long study of the social and behavioral aspects of COVID-19 related behaviors. Much of Jenkins-Smith’s research is based on the NIRR’s substantial investment in data collection infrastructure – utilizing both social media and survey data – that enables both long-term and real-time monitoring of the social and policy contexts in which public health, security and environmental programs operate. In his spare time, Jenkins-Smith engages in personal experiments in risk perception and management via boxing, motorcycling and back-country hiking.

Lead PI: Kanthasamy Muraleetharan
School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, Gallogly College of Engineering

K.K. “Muralee” Muraleetharan is the Kimmell-Bernard Chair in Engineering and a David Ross Boyd and Presidential Professor of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science in the Gallogly College of Engineering. He is also the associate director for infrastructure and engineering at OU's National Institute for Risk and Resilience. Through NIRR, he is leading the Sustainable Infrastructure  focus area for the recently funded $20 million NSF EPSCoR project titled “Socially Sustainable Solutions for Water, Carbon, and Infrastructure Resilience.”

Prior to OU, he worked as a consulting engineer in California for six years. He is a registered Geotechnical Engineer (the highest level of registration available for a practicing geotechnical engineer in United States) in California. In California, he worked on several major projects, such as the earthquake engineering design of Port of Los Angeles’ Pier 400 and geotechnical and environmental investigations for the Los Angles Metro Rail subway tunnels.

Muraleethran joined the OU faculty in 1994, where he has been a PI or Co-PI on research grants totaling over $10 million and participated in many educational initiatives, including the School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Sciences’ NSF funded Sooner City project. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2006. He has served on several NSF Site Visit Teams reviewing major research facilities and programs.

Muraleetharan is interested in large-scale computer simulations of infrastructure (bridges, roads, levees, port facilities, etc.) subjected to extreme events (earthquakes, hurricanes, blasts, etc.), validations of these simulations using small-scale (e.g. centrifuge models) and full-scale testing, and resilience of infrastructure systems following extreme events. His computer simulation research involves scalable, parallel computing using finite element frameworks. He is also interested in computer simulations of fluid flows and solid deformations in multiphase porous media (e.g., oil and water flows in deformable rocks).

Lead PI: Robert Nairn
School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, Gallogly College of Engineering

Robert “Bob” Nairn, associate professor, School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, Gallogly College of Engineering, serves as the director of the Center for Restoration of Ecosystems and Watersheds and as associate director of the Water Technologies for Emerging Regions (WaTER) Center. Current research focuses broadly on natural infrastructure, especially examination of functions and services provided by natural and engineered ecosystems that benefit environmental quality. Much of this work falls into two broad areas of research: watershed biogeochemistry (environmental transport and fate of materials and energy) and ecological engineering (design, construction and evaluation of human-made ecosystems). Specifically, his research emphasizes naturally occurring biogeochemical and ecological processes contributing to water quality improvement, with an emphasis on ecotoxic metal contaminant retention in mine drainage passive treatment systems, nutrient amelioration in agricultural watersheds, documentation of receiving stream ecological recovery, and use of novel environmental monitoring techniques, among other topics.

His research includes laboratory bench-scale experimentation, greenhouse-level microcosm/mesocosm studies, and full-scale field evaluations (the latter of which is the major focus). For more than 20 years, he has focused on drastically disturbed watersheds impacted by historic mining activity in the Tri-State Lead-Zinc Mining District of Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri (including the Tar Creek Superfund Site), the Arkoma Basin coal fields of Oklahoma and Arkansas, and the Potosi mining district of the southern Bolivian Andes. He also works extensively in the Grand Lake o’ the Cherokees, Lake Thunderbird, Canadian River and several other watersheds in the southern Great Plains. A recent emphasis examines the environmental, economic and social benefits provided by collaborative Engineering With Nature efforts.

Lead PI: Xiangming Xiao
Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology and the Center for Spatial Analysis, College of Arts and Sciences

I joined OU as full professor of ecology and remote sensing at the Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology in 2008 and directed the Center for Earth Observation and Modeling. My research interests are diverse, and our research portfolio is composed of three major themes. Our first theme is centered on land use and land cover changes in the world. We combine satellite remote sensing and citizen science to measure, monitor, report and verify land cover and land use changes (e.g., forest, cropland, grassland, urban, wetlands, surface water bodies). We investigate how socio-economic and climate factors drive LULCC and assess the impacts of LULCC on climate, carbon and water cycles and biodiversity. Our second theme is focused on terrestrial ecosystem structure, functions and service. We combine in-situ sensors (e.g., eddy covariance methods), airborne and spaceborne remote sensing (optical, microwave, thermal and LiDAR) to identify and quantify the spatial-temporal changes in carbon fluxes and stocks, and ecosystem service. We integrate multi-source and multi-scale data, various models, machine learning and data assimilation to predict and forecast ecosystem dynamics. We have developed and released the global dataset of gross primary production of vegetation, which is widely used by various stakeholders. Our third theme is to study the ecosystem (environment) – animal – human health (One Health) and to assess evolution and transmission risk of zoonotic infectious diseases, including highly pathogenic avian influenza (e.g., H5N1), tick-borne diseases and rodent-borne diseases. We combine multi-source data, statistical models and machine learning to predict the hot-spots and hot-moments of these infectious diseases, and the resultant risk maps were used to support surveillance, response and pandemic preparedness.

Lead PI: Jason Vogel
School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science and Oklahoma Water Survey, Gallogly College of Engineering

Jason R. Vogel is director of the Oklahoma Water Survey and a professor in the OU School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science. For more than 20 years, he has worked to facilitate and develop solutions for water issues throughout the Great Plains. He developed an award-winning stormwater and stream management research and outreach program while at Oklahoma State University and is recognized as one of the leading experts in low-impact development stormwater management systems in the region. Vogel has served the water sector at the national, state and local levels for a variety of groups, including the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, the American Ecological Engineering Society and Oklahoma Clean Lakes and Watersheds Association. 

Lead PI: Kyle Murray
Oklahoma Geological Survey and School of Geology and Geophysics, Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy

Kyle E. Murray, a hydrogeologist at the Oklahoma Geological Survey and an adjunct faculty member in the School of Geology and Geophysics, both in OU’s Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy, has a diverse and interdisciplinary portfolio of research. Through his research, he hopes to promote sustainability of water, environmental, and energy resources.

Because of the vast volumes of water managed within the energy industry, Murray’s research on the water-energy nexus has focused on collecting fundamental data on produced water quantity and quality. His efforts to understand brine production and saltwater disposal led to projects examining saltwater disposal practices, monitoring pressure and measuring/modeling poroelastic responses in the subsurface. With support from the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, he is putting together a produced water quality database that can be used to assess produced water treatment and reuse options, and to explore the potential for brine resource recovery.

Murray’s research on contaminants of emerging concern spans a couple of decades, with publications on that topic appearing in Water Science & Technology (2009) and Environmental Pollution (2010). More recently, in Oklahoma, he has sampled various water supply sources including lakes, rivers and wastewater treatment plant effluent. Analytical results of CEC and interpretations of the fate of CEC in water supply are being used by municipal water suppliers to plan for potable reuse projects.

OGS and Murray are beginning to conduct research on geological sequestration of carbon by building upon previous research on carbon and subsurface injection of fluids. Murray hopes to help position OGS and OU as a key collaborator on carbon sequestration research and project implementation.

Lead PI: Tiantian Yang
School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, Gallogly College of Engineering

In the $20 million NSF award, RII Track-1: Socially Sustainable Solutions for Water, Carbon, and Infrastructure Resilience in Oklahoma,  Tiantian Yang, assistant professor, School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, Gallogly College of Engineering, will lead the project on improving the management and operation of Lake Thunderbird in Norman, Oklahoma, using subseasonal-to-seasonal hydrometeorological forecasts and machine learning algorithms. The lake was constructed between 1962 and 1965 to provide municipal water to the nearby communities of Del City, Midwest City and Norman. With the supports of the City of Norman and the Central Oklahoma Master Conservancy District, Yang will first improve long-term precipitation forecast accuracy from an existing subseasonal-to-seasonal multi-model ensemble product, and then apply advanced machine learning models and process-based hydrologic models to investigate the possible Lake Thunderbird operation strategies under different forecast scenarios and uncertainties. The scope of work is of great importance for the City of Norman to establish long-term and sustainable water management plans, to improve the residential water supply reliability at an extended forecast range, and to optimize their water purchasing strategies with the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Water Department in an adaptive manner. The project led by Dr. Yang resides in the Focus Area 3-Variable and Marginal Quality Water Supplies theme of this award, and also has strong synergies to the Focus Area 1-Changing Subseasonal to Seasonal Weather Patterns (S2S), and the Area of Social Dynamics Research Framework (SD).

Co-PI: Carol Silva
Department of Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences; Center for Risk and Crisis Management; and National Institute for Risk and Resilience

Carol L. Silva (Ph.D. in political science and public policy from the University of Rochester) is an Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor of Political Science, director of the Center for Risk and Crisis Management and co-director (with Hank Jenkins-Smith) of the National Institute for Risk and Resilience in the College of Arts and Sciences. Silva has published books and articles on public policy analysis, presidential politics, climate and weather, natural disasters, election management, and environmental policy. Silva's research encompasses the intersection of a set of theoretical and methodological social science issues. She studies social valuation generally, and more specifically the translation of values into public choice.

Silva specializes in the building and conduct of research programs for interdisciplinary teams and the coordination of resources that encourage and support the achievements of those teams, and she contributes to state-of-the-art social science discoveries. She is an experienced instructor and directs well-funded research programs in the domains of energy policy, the intersection of technology and democratic institutions, weather and climate policy, COVID-19 adaptation, and benefit cost analysis/non-market valuation.

She is the science co-lead (with Jenkins-Smith) on a five-year NSF study focusing on finding sustainable solutions to the complex problems at the intersection of weather, water, land cover and infrastructure in Oklahoma. Silva is the project director of a science cooperation program between OU and the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín, one of Peru’s largest and oldest public research universities, on four collaborative projects to study climate change impacts and adaptation strategies for Latin America, as well as advanced public health monitoring and technologies to mitigate the disparate impact of diseases such as cancer and COVD-19 amongst the urban and rural populations of Peru. She is also the co-PI on an NSF grant for a year-long study of the social and behavioral aspects of COVID-19 related behaviors. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7171-6944

Co-PI: Elinor Martin
School of Meteorology, South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center, and Center for Autonomous Sensing and Sampling, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences

Elinor Martin earned her bachelor of science degree with honors in meteorology, with a year in Oklahoma, from the University of Reading in the UK; her master of science degree in atmospheric science from Colorado State University; and her doctoral degree in atmospheric science from Texas A&M University, where her work focused on weather-climate interactions in Caribbean rainfall. After holding a postdoctoral position at SUNY Albany researching decadal climate variability in West Africa, she joined the OU School of Meteorology faculty in 2014.

Martin currently is an assistant professor and associate director for undergraduate studies and affiliate faculty at the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center and Center for Autonomous Sensing and Sampling. The work conducted by her group aims to further our knowledge of climate, climate variability, and weather-climate interactions through research and education, with a focus on precipitation. This work is accomplished with the use of observations and model simulations to increase our understanding of essential mechanisms and processes leading to changes in precipitation. Work produced by her group has ranged from global investigations to changes in wet and dry periods and the seasonal timing of rainfall, to tropical rainfall and Oklahoma winter precipitation. In parallel with these efforts, her group works with the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center and stakeholders to ensure that the science and education materials produced and useable and actionable.

Co-PI: Joe Ripberger
Department of Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences; and Center for Risk and Crisis Management

Joe Ripberger is an assistant professor of political science and the deputy director for research at the National Institute for Risk at Resilience in the College of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on risk and public policy with an emphasis on weather, climate and water policy. He is currently working on a variety of interdisciplinary teams to systematically assess and improve forecast and warning programs and policies in the United States. He is also working with a large group of researchers and policymakers throughout Oklahoma to develop socially sustainable solutions to complex problems that affect water, land and infrastructure resources in the state.

Co-PI: Paul Moses
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

Paul Moses, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering, leads a research group that is exploring complex electromagnetic transient phenomena in electrical power systems. With increasing distributed generation from solar and wind resources, the power grid is becoming more distorted and chaotic in operation. One of the main concerns is the impact on system protection devices whose function is to correctly identify and isolate power line faults. The fault disturbance signatures become entangled with renewable activity as opposed to conventional non-renewable operation, which has governed existing protection devices for several decades. The consequences range from dangerous faults being overlooked or unnecessary outages. Moses’s research group focuses its work on gaining a better understanding of the disturbance features and devising new detection and mitigation approaches to enhance system protection performance. The team has successfully developed and simulated new fault protection algorithms that show significant advantages for detecting disturbances mixed with volatile and intermittent renewable energy sources. The proposed approaches overcome technical barriers to conventional methods, reducing the risk of misclassifying faults or spurious operation of protection devices that would unnecessarily disconnect customers. The outcomes of the research support the de-risking of future smart grids operating with distributed energy resources, including solar, wind, electric vehicle charging and battery energy storage.

Co-PI: Jason Furtado
School of Meteorology, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences

My research agenda revolves around two emergingly important areas of climate dynamics: subseasonal-to-seasonal and seasonal-to-decadal predictions. These two areas represent large yet important “predictability gaps” in time for regional weather and climate variability. In the S2S space, I focus primarily on understanding and making skillful long-lead predictions of S2S extreme weather events (e.g., heatwaves, cold air outbreaks, droughts). For example, I have conducted significant research in stratosphere-troposphere dynamical coupling and its relationship to extreme winter weather patterns. Specific research topics in this area include polar vortex dynamics, Arctic-middle latitude weather connections, and evaluation of these processes in S2S dynamical prediction systems. Two currently active, interdisciplinary research grants tackle other S2S predictability challenges in the U.S.: (1) Improved long-lead predictions of S2S heavy precipitation events across the country and (2) Understanding S2S processes impacting Oklahoma/the Southern Plains and the potential predictability of these events.

These specific research projects involve integration of several observational datasets, reanalysis products, advanced statistical techniques and model simulations, along with interactions with stakeholders. In the S2D space, my research centers around El Niño-Southern Oscillation predictability and Pacific decadal variability, including interactions between the tropical Pacific and the extratropical Pacific. One main area of research is the importance of South Pacific climate variability, a sparsely studied region, in improving long-lead (e.g., 6-9+ month) predictions of ENSO events, including challenging the “spring barrier” problem plaguing these skillful predictions in dynamical models. Additionally, my colleagues and I recently identified another pattern of PDV in the North Pacific – the Pacific Decadal Precession – and are actively investigating its role in North American multi-decadal hydroclimate variability and its effects on North Pacific marine ecosystems.

Co-PI: Philip Harvey
School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, Gallogly College of Engineering

Philip Harvey, associate professor, School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, Gallogly College of Engineering, conducts research in the fields of structural dynamics and earthquake engineering, with a focus on resilient solutions for infrastructure. He is an NSF CAREER award recipient for his work in seismic isolation of sensitive yet critical equipment in essential facilities. This research is investigating novel solutions for protecting equipment from multi-directional excitations. Other ongoing projects are related to the resilience of transportation, power and water infrastructure in Oklahoma subject to a changing climate and the increased hazards that are expected to result. This work is part of the $20 million NSF EPSCoR RII Track-1 award, on which he is a Co-PI ,and serves as co-lead of the sustainable infrastructure team. In addition, Harvey has been the sole PI on three NSF awards during his seven years at OU, as well as serving as PI on two state-funded projects related to induced seismicity and its impact on bridges operated by the Oklahoma Department of Transportation and Oklahoma Turnpike Authority.

Co-PI: Gerald Miller
School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, Gallogly College of Engineering

Gerald Miller is a Presidential Professor and associate director in the School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, Gallogly College of Engineering. His research interests include invasive-type in situ testing in unsaturated soils; use of in situ test results for foundation design; development of innovative in situ testing technology; slope stability; field testing of prototype foundations; and field evaluation of soil stabilization and earthwork construction. He is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers Geo-Institute Technical Committee on Unsaturated Soils (2008-Present). 

Miller is a member of the OK NSF EPSCoR Track-1 RII Award titled Socially Sustainable Solutions for Water, Carbon, and Infrastructure Resilience in Oklahoma. The $20 million research project is a social science-led, multidisciplinary collaboration among social, physical, biological, engineering and computational scientists. Over 30 researchers from across the state are working together on the project, which began July 1, 2020. Miller's research in the areas of civil engineering and geotechnical engineering supports the OK NSF EPSCoR project's Focus Area 4: Sustainable Water and Energy Infrastructure (SI). The SI focus area's primary goal is to develop an aggregated resilience model to characterize the influence of diverse stakeholders’ decision-making behavior on the functions of interdependent infrastructure systems.  

Researcher Statement:

Lead PI: Grant Biedermann
Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy and Center for Quantum Research and Technology, College of Arts and Sciences

Grant Biedermann is an associate professor, a Homer L. Dodge Professor of Atomic, Optical and Molecular Physics and an affiliate of the Center for Quantum Research and Technology, Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, College of Arts and Sciences.

Ultra-cold neutral atoms, with their long coherence times and weak coupling to laboratory noise, are an excellent platform for experiments in quantum state control and metrology. Biederman’s group is developing a new experiment to generate and control large, entangled spin states for this purpose using ultracold neutral cesium atoms held in optical tweezers. Such a platform can be used for investigating quantum logic gate protocols and the interplay between experimental robustness and computational complexity.  

Researcher Statements:

Lead PI: Steven Crossley
School of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

Steven Crossley is associate professor, the Sam A. Wilson Professor of Chemical Engineering, and the Roger and Sherry Teigen Presidential Professor in the Department of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering, where he leads the Crossley Catalysis and Nanomaterials Group. His research focuses on reaction kinetics and nanomaterials synthesis. Crossley is the recipient of the American Chemical Society PRF Doctoral New Investigator award (2014) and the NSF CAREER award (2017). He has published over 30 peer reviewed journal articles, including in high-impact journals such as Science, Science Advances, and Energy and Environmental Science, and he has given over 40 oral presentations at national meetings and departmental seminars. 

Co-PI: Lance Lobban
School of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

National Science Foundation Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation program co-PI Lance Lobban is the Francis Winn Chair and David Ross Boyd Professor of Chemical Engineering in the School of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering. His research is in the field of areas chemical reaction engineering and catalysis with emphasis on energy, materials and environmental applications. His current research projects involve the study of depolymerization reaction kinetics and mechanisms for plastic recycling and reactions and mechanisms for conversion of biomass to fuels and chemicals.

Co-PI: Adam Feltz
Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences

Adam Feltz, an associate professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, specializes in theoretical and applied science for ethical and informed decision-making. His research interests include the psychology and philosophy of ethical disagreement, and he is best-known for his groundbreaking work identifying sources of fundamental philosophical biases in moral judgment. Feltz has published more than 50 papers on topics ranging from assessment of decision biases in surrogate decision-making to the design of ethical decision support and risk communications in health, medicine, finance, food manufacturing, natural resource management and other domains. His research has been supported by such agencies as the National Science Foundation, the UCLA Law School, Animal Charity Evaluators and the Templeton Foundation. Feltz serves as a co-founding member and co-director of RiskLiteracy.org and as a member of OU’s Center for Applied Social Research and the editorial board of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. 

Co-PI: Bin Wang
School of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

Bin Wang is an associate professor in the School of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering. Before joining OU in 2014, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University. He received his doctorate in chemistry from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship. He was honored with the Young Scientist Prize in the 10th International Conference on Atomically Controlled Surfaces, Interfaces and Nanostructures, a Department of Energy Early Career award, and an OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award by the American Chemical Society, Computers in Chemistry Division. Recently, he has been included in the list of ACS’s 2021 Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research Influential Researcher and Marquis Who’s Who in America. His research is focused on applications of computational simulations to understand and design novel materials with interesting functionality and applications in sustainable energy and environment. Current projects include catalysis for biomass conversion, refinery and plastic upcycling, lithium sulfur batteries and optoelectronic materials. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles in these research areas, including in Nature Catalysis, Nature Communications, Physical Review Letters, Nano Letters and ACS Catalysis. He has mentored two Ph.D., three master’s and over 15 undergraduates and high school students in research during the past seven years. His current research group has five graduate students and one postdoctoral researcher.

Researcher Statements:

Lead PI: Robert Palmer
School of Meteorology, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences

Robert Palmer is a professor of meteorology and the Tommy C. Craighead Chair in the School of Meteorology and the associate vice president for research in the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences.

Significant advantages exist for phased array radar applications when moving the digitization level closer to the array face. For example, an all-digital architecture would be software reconfigurable (multiple, adaptive beams), provide high dynamic range, allow graceful degradation and, most importantly, allow effective implementation of alignment and polarimetric self-calibration methods. Without the last feature, the hope of operational use of weather radar polarimetry and fast scanning from phased array radars would be severely diminished. As a result, several important federal programs have emerged surrounding all-digital radar architectures, especially in the defense arena (e.g., FlexDAR, DARPA ACT, Army DART, Space Fence).

For weather and with the support from NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, the Advanced Radar Research Center at OU is currently developing the “Horus” all-digital polarimetric phased array radar. When completed, the full-scale Horus radar (1024 dual-pol radiating elements) hopes to serve as a testbed for NSSL and OU for evaluation and risk reduction activities for various architectures and techniques surrounding the topical area of polarimetric phased array weather radar. For the proposed R&D effort and while the Horus radar is being completed, emphasis will be placed on the application of Horus and all-digital architectures, in general.

Example topics include (1) mutual-coupling calibration, (2) UAS-based calibration, (3) interference mitigation via analog filters, (4) 3D wind estimation using passive techniques, (5) various waveform and scanning strategy studies, and (6) investigation of the meteorological advantages of all-digital radars. High-fidelity simulations based on NWP models will be exploited when necessary before the Horus radar is completed in 2021.

Co-PI: David Bodine
Advanced Radar Research Center

David Bodine is a research scientist at the Advanced Radar Research Center, where he works within a dynamic environment of meteorologists and engineers seeking to develop innovative radar technology for meteorological research and other applications. The group's research focuses on understanding severe convective storms and precipitation processes using polarimetric and phased array radars and numerical simulations. They conduct field experiments in Oklahoma each spring to study supercells and tornadoes, and also deploy the ARRC's mobile radars around the world for diverse field experiments ranging from hydrometeorology to aeroecology. The group’s research efforts are supported by the National Science Foundation, NOAA, Department of Energy, private-sector companies (Weathernews, Inc., Nanowave Technologies), state agencies and the U.S. Air Force.

Co-PI: Caleb Fulton
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

While the year 2020 will likely (and justifiably) live in infamy in the hearts of many, it is one for which I will be eternally grateful. After nearly losing my life in a motorcycle accident in October of 2019, I returned in a pandemic-garbled professor role in early 2020 to a community of students, faculty, professional engineers and staff who, with open (but mostly virtual) arms, made it feel to me like a year of rebirth. I got a new laptop to replace the one that was broken in the accident. I got news of new funding to pursue a project that resonates with personal experiences and losses from more than a decade ago. The Digital Array Radar system, a single subarray that I built in 2010 for my Ph.D. at Purdue, planted seeds and generated ideas that I brought to OU, leading to the development of the Horus all-digital phased array, starting in roughly 2015. In 2020, these seeds sprouted into a single Horus subarray that radiated and received for the first time, and it is growing today into the system(s) that it will ultimately become. These archetypal “rebirths” came as direct or tangential results of the numerous long-term, multidisciplinary and multi-level projects in which I have been a PI or CO-PI in the last eight years. However, it is the aforementioned community’s dedication to doing the actual hard work that has kept these developments going. Witnessing this work has ultimately rekindled within me the passion for engineering science that brought me to this field to begin with, and the receipt of this Annual Award for Excellence in Research Grants is a welcome affirmation of my own efforts.

Co-PI: Boon Leng Cheong
Advanced Radar Research Center and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences

Boon Leng Cheong was born in Malaysia on May 20, 1976. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2005, with a dissertation on adaptive beamforming to observe the atmospheric boundary layer using the Turbulent Eddy Profiler.  He came to OU immediately after his graduation. From 2005-2007, he was a postdoctoral fellow with the School of Meteorology. The opportunity allowed him to utilize his expertise in digital signal processing in the areas of remote sensing using ground-based radars. In 2008, he joined the Advanced Radar Research Center as a research scientist. He also is currently affiliated with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an adjunct associate professor and the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies as an executive board member and fellow.

His research interests include modern software-defined radar design, array signal processing, real-time software architecture, parallel computing, numerical simulations and artificial intelligence using deep learning. He is the key developer of the PX-1000 and PX-10k systems, which are solid-state based X-band polarimetric transportable radars. Throughout his career, he has published in internationally recognized scholarly journals. He has authored and co-authored more than 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and over 100 conference presentations and invited talks.

Co-PI: Jorge Salazar Cerreño
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

Since joining the OU family in 2015, I have been fortunate to collaborate with very talented individuals who created a synergy that enabled securing funding for research in cutting-edge technology for radar communication systems. Grant funding allowed me to expand my research in phased array antennas, and through that research, to further my mission of creating advanced systems to improve on existing technology in the areas of weather and military radar that will enhance the protection of human life. These grants allowed me to create a Phased Array Antenna Research and Development Group, which has as its mission the development of state-of-the-art improvements for current radar technology critical for weather and military applications. PAARD has graduated 11 undergraduates, six M.S. and five Ph.D. students, and two postdocs in the six years I have been at OU.

During my six years at OU, I have had the opportunity to develop new technology that enhanced phased array antennas and communication systems. Designing new components, sub-systems and radar architectures to improve or solve a problem is quite important in our research community. In the past five years, communication technology has evolved rapidly, requiring new devices that provide better performance in retrieving large amounts of data. Using a higher portion of the spectrum is attractive for large channel capacity; however, the challenges associated with high frequencies make the research difficult. Addressing the evolving technological needs, my team is exploring exploiting higher frequencies (40 GHz to 100 GHz) intended for use in the front-end design of automobile radars and is investigating the use of even higher frequencies (100 GHz to 300 GHz) for the future generation of communication systems (6G).

Co-PI: Hjalti Sigmarsson
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

To meet the ever-growing demand for higher data rates and the envisioned, widespread connectivity for the internet of things (IoT), an increase in the available bandwidths and operating frequencies of devices is necessary. The next generation of high-frequency communications and radar systems will require unprecedented agility to allow for efficient utilization of the radio frequency spectrum. Achieving this agility will require intelligent and autonomous spectral sharing methods. One of the challenges is the implementation of high-frequency hardware that is capable of sensing and identifying available spectrum and adjusting its operation to avoid interference.

Associate Professor Hjalti Sigmarsson’s research focuses on advancing the state-of-the-art in reconfigurable hardware at RF and microwave frequencies, which will be critical for the operation of these agile future systems. It includes research on tunable filters and antennas, high-efficiency and high-power amplifiers, adaptive matching networks, simultaneous transmit and receive techniques, and reconfigurable hardware integration in integrated circuits. Furthermore, his research interests also include spectral management schemes for cognitive radio architectures, closed-loop feedback control for tunable devices, advanced packaging, component miniaturization and the utilization of various rapid prototyping methods to realize electromagnetic structures.

Examples of ongoing research projects include miniaturized filter integration into digital-at-every-element radar systems and investigation of the system-level performance improvements that available through interference mitigation; hardware and waveform improvements to an airborne synthetic aperture radar in preparation for space deployment; development of filtering antenna arrays for high-power, agile radar systems; and hardware development for SAR deployment on small unmanned aerial systems.

Co-PI: Mark Yeary
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

Mark Yeary is the Hudson-Torchmark Presidential Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering. His research and teaching interests are in the area of digital signal processing as applied to customized DSP systems and instrumentation, primarily in radar, with an emphasis on hardware prototype development and practical measurements. Yeary was a founding member of OU’s Advanced Radar Research Center design facility known as the Radar Innovations Laboratory and continues to serve in a leadership capacity within the ARRC. He has written over 275 conference papers, conference abstracts and journal papers in these areas. Yeary has also served as a PI or Co-PI on grants from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Science Foundation-ATM, NSF-DUE, NSF-ECCS, Department of Defense-EPSCoR, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-Collaborative Science Technology, and Applied Research, NOAA-NSSL, Raytheon, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Office of Naval Research, Tinker Air Force Base, CACI, and CGI Federal. Since arriving at OU in 2002, he has supervised and supported 55 undergraduate and graduate students in the completion of research toward their degrees. In addition, he has provided support for eight post-doctoral researchers and has served on 46 other graduate student committees. Yeary has spent time at Raytheon, during the summers of 2002-2020, mostly in Dallas. In the fall of 2012 and spring of 2013, Yeary joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory while on sabbatical to make technical contributions and anechoic chamber measurements at nearby Hanscom Air Force Base related to one of the preliminary radar panels associated with the national Multifunction Phased Array Radar effort. Yeary is a Fellow of the IEEE, a licensed Professional Engineer and member of the Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu honor societies. He received the 2005 Outstanding Young Engineer Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, given by the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society.  

Co-PI: Tian-You Yu
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

Tian You Yu is Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. He has a wide range of interests in digital signal processing and atmospheric applications through radar observations. Before Dr. Yu joined OU, he had worked on various types of profiler radars to study atmospheric dynamics from boundary layer to the mesosphere. His current interest is to develop novel and sophisticated radar technologies to improve radar measurement and to advance the fundamental knowledge of meteorological phenomena. 

Co-PI: Guifu Zhang
School of Meteorology, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences

Guifu Zhang is a Sam K. Viersen Presidential Professor in the School of Meteorology, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences.

As a part of MPAR (Multi-mission Phased Array Radar) project and in collaborating with Advanced Radar Research Center engineers, we have designed and developed the cylindrical polarimetric phased array radar at OU. The CPPAR has been calibrated and tested to have demonstrated its capability in fast and accurate polarimetric weather measurements. It has been shown that the CPPAR has the property of polarization purity and azimuthally scan-invariant beam characteristics. The initial weather observations have been performed with both single beam mechanical scan and commutating beam electronic scan, show the uniqueness of the CPPAR in accurate weather measurements and the advantages of the CPPAR over other array configurations.

I have also worked with colleagues at OU and NSSL to develop a set of accurate and efficient radar observation operators to link numerical weather prediction variables with polarimetric radar data for efficient PRD simulations and assimilations to improve weather forecasts.

Researcher Statements:

Lead PI: Jizhong Zhou
Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology and Institute for Environmental Genomics, College of Arts and Sciences

Jizhong Zhou is a George Lynn Cross Research Professor of Microbiology, Presidential Professor and director of the Institute for Environmental Genomics in the College of Arts and Sciences. The long-term research interests in Zhou’s lab at OU are centered on environmental microbiology across different organizational levels ranging from genomes to ecosystems, which can be further divided into the following areas: (1) Functional genomics: Linking genes to functions through understanding gene functions and regulatory networks by focusing on several important groups of microorganisms; (2) Genomics technologies: developing integrated high throughput experimental and bioinformatic technologies such as GeoChip for microbial community analysis; (3) Ecological genomics: linking community structure to ecosystem functioning through applications of high throughput integrated cutting-edge genomic technologies to address frontier research questions related to bioenergy, global changes, carbon sequestration, environmental remediation, industrial and agricultural practices, ecological theories, and public health; (4) Metagenomics and microbial ecology: using high throughput genome sequencing and associated genomics technologies to examine microbial community diversity at various habitats, microbial biogeography and mechanisms shaping microbial diversity patterns, distribution and dynamics; (5) Evolutionary genomics: linking genotypes to phenotypes through long-term laboratory experimental evolution, and comparative sequence analysis; (6) Bioinformatics and systems biology: developing novel ecological network and mathematical modeling approaches to address questions related to systems biology and ecosystem sciences important to environments, energy as well as human health. Zhou’s lab has performed multidisciplinary studies using integrative experimental and computational approaches by taking the advantages of the lab’s broad background in microbial genomics, molecular biology, molecular evolution, microbiology, ecology, mathematics and bioinformatics. 

Co-PI: Naijia Xiao
Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology, College of Arts and Sciences

I am a research scientist from the Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology, College of Arts and Sciences, at OU. My work responsibilities include exploring existing advanced mathematical and computational tools to analyze big microbiome data, developing new framework and approaches for advanced microbiome data analysis, and coordinating development and usage of experimental and computational resources for microbiome research across different campuses at OU. My current research interests focus on the application of novel computational approaches for complex dynamic systems and advanced experimental tools for microbiome analysis to measure, analyze and predict microbial community dynamics at the system level. I am developing novel mathematical and computational approaches based on the data-driven empirical dynamic modeling to detect and analyze transient dynamics and causal relationships in microbial communities, incorporating established tools such as network analysis and random matrix theory. I am also interested in development of a new theoretical process-based stochastic model for the population dynamics of complex biological systems, development of a new analysis tool to characterize the functional diversity of microbial communities and its impact, development of new functional gene arrays for better understanding of complex microbial systems, and application of neural networks to data-driven complex system analysis of microbial communities.

Co-PI: Daliang Ning
Institute for Environmental Genomics

I am a research scientist in the Institute for Environmental Genomics at OU. I currently devote myself to several exciting directions in microbial ecology. One is the microbial community assembly mechanism, to reveal how microbial diversity is shaped by complex processes, such as selection, competition, migration, random drift. Under the supervision of Professor Jizhong Zhou, I developed new algorithms and tools for quantitative understanding of those mechanisms, which are widely applied to various natural and engineered ecosystems. I am also interested in microbial ecology in environmental engineering and global changes, particularly at global and continental scales. I am a major coordinator of the Global Water Microbiome Consortium, an international collaborative platform to facilitate global water and wastewater microbiome research. We have launched three global research initiatives, and the first one has brought compelling insights into the global diversity and biogeography of bacteria in wastewater treatment systems. Meanwhile, I have been deeply involved in the long-term study on microbial responses and feedbacks to global climate change at IEG, particularly the assembly mechanisms underlying the microbiome dynamics and their relationship to ecosystem functions. Besides, we are exploring the general rules in microbiome dynamics, for which I am serving as a co-PI in a project funded by the National Science Foundation. I have published 66 peer-reviewed papers in various journals, including Nature Microbiology, Nature Communications and PNAS, and given 30 conference presentations. In addition, I serve as an editor for two journals – Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering and Frontiers in Microbiology – and as a reviewer for 14 journals. I am a developer and maintainer of two R packages and four web-based pipelines. I enjoy hosting microbial community data analysis workshops, which are open to our campus.

Co-PI: Yajiao Wang
Institute for Environmental Genomics

I am a postdoc in the Institute for Environmental Genomics at OU. I am interested in understanding the effects and functions of microbial activities in groundwater. They would substantially impact the fates of contaminants, which can be further utilized to develop bio-remediation technologies to reduce groundwater pollution. During my Ph.D. research, I developed a novel granular sludge process of hydrogenotrophic denitrification to treat nitrate pollution in groundwater and investigated the mechanism of nitrous oxide generation under different environmental conditions. After joining Professor Jizhong Zhou’s lab at OU, I have been interested in building reactive transport models to integrate various active hydrological, geochemical and microbial processes in groundwater, and describing and predicting the distribution of chemicals accounting for the transport and transformations. We are trying to improve the traditional reactive transport model by incorporating the meta-omics information for explicitly representing microbial kinetics (e.g., microbial growth, maintenance and turnover; microbial consumption of and competition for substrates). This research is funded by DOE, and the field test was conducted at the Oak Ridge Reservation. The new model could be applied to quantitatively and systematically predict the fate and transportations of contaminants in groundwater under different scenarios, e.g., the dosage of various carbon sources to reduce nitrate and uranium pollution, extreme flood and low temperature. Because the omics-data-enhanced model can predict the microbial community dynamics in groundwater, we are interested in using it to test ecological rules and provide insights to propose new hypotheses.

Co-PI: Gangsheng Wang
Institute for Environmental Genomics

Co-PI: Linwei Wu
Institute for Environmental Genomics

I am a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute for Environmental Genomics at OU. I received B.S. in environmental engineering and Ph.D. in environmental science and engineering, both at Tsinghua University. I currently devote the efforts on microbial ecology in engineered bioreactor systems such as wastewater treatment plants, where microorganisms play key roles in pollutant removal to protect public and environmental health. The engineered bioreactors are also ideal models to study the rules governing microbial biodiversity and dynamics. Under the supervision of Professor Jizhong Zhou, I studied different bioreactor systems to address various theoretical ecology questions. For example, I have taken part in the Global Water Microbiome Consortium, an international collaborative platform to facilitate global water and wastewater microbiome research. We have launched the study on the global diversity and biogeography of bacteria of wastewater treatment systems, which yielded new insight into the fundamental structure and function of microbial communities of activated sludge. I am also interested in developing new algorithms and models toward a quantitative, theoretical ecology. I developed a stochastic differential equation model-based framework to quantify the importance of stochastic processes in controlling microbial biodiversity and dynamics. In the future, I will try to extend the theoretical study of microbial ecology to natural ecosystems such as grassland and forest. I have published 22 peer-reviewed papers in various journals, including Nature Microbiology, Nature Climate Change and ISME J. In addition, I serve as a reviewer for 10 journals, including  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, ISME J. and  Environmental Science & Technology.

Co-PI: Ya Zhang
Institute for Environmental Genomics

My multicultural education in China, the United States and Europe on environmental/public health engineering allows me to have an overarching understanding of the relationships among the public, private and third sectors. Growing up in Beijing, I was exposed to the complex political and socio-economic environment in China at an early age. Since working in the United States the past 12 years, I have  collaborated extensively with a variety of funding and regulatory agencies, research institutes and water utilities across different countries, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Water Research Foundation, Oasen DrinkWater in the Netherlands, and over 30 large drinking water and wastewater treatment plants. Meanwhile, I traveled frequently to Europe for collaborative projects. I witnessed the desperate need of investment on a vast network of urban infrastructures from roads and bridges to drinking water and wastewater systems and its impact on people’s daily life.

My graduate training in the ecology of water microbiomes, the-state-of-art meta-omics techniques and bioinformatics has provided me with an excellent research platform to build on. My long-term academic interests are elucidating the reciprocal interactions among microbes, humans and urban infrastructures at household, local and regional scales through a biome’s perspective. Humans, microbes and environments are all hitched to each other in the process of adapting urban areas to climate change. This emerging system-wise view poses a great challenge to the traditional perspective of researching the individual components in such systems. New approaches toward system-level understanding are under development. I seek an integral approach to correlate microbes with their fitness and performance at multi-scales of urban environments to uncover underlying patterns for improving human living.

In my free time, I am a passionate reader, a runner and a tennis player.

Researcher Statements:

Lead PI: Pejman Kazempoor
School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

Pejman Kazempoor is director of the Center for Sustainable Energy and Carbon Management and an assistant professor in the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering, at OU. He has a multidisciplinary background in mechanical and chemical engineering. Prior to his employment with OU, Kazempoor worked in research and development for Baker Hughes and GE Global Research, where he was responsible for driving innovative research and development activities and taking early-stage technologies from the conceptual stage to full commercialization with the business units. He also spent time in academia as a researcher at Colorado School of Mines, the Max Planck Institute and Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (ETH-Domain). Kazempoor is the recipient of BHGE’s 2018 Technology Excellence Award, and associate editor for the Journal of Natural Gas Science and Engineering-Elsevier. He also has published over 50 papers in various national and international peer-reviewed journals and conferences, including a book chapter. Kazempoor's innovative experience is also highlighted by several U.S. patents.

Kazempoor ‘s current research activities focus on sustainable energy technologies, greenhouse gas management, energy storage, hydrogen energy, carbon capture and utilization, and electrochemical energy systems, especially high-temperature fuel cells and batteries. His research goal is to develop unique solutions that are locally appropriate; socially beneficial; economically and technically feasible; and environmentally responsible for current energy challenges.

Project summary: The objective is to develop and validate a novel, low-cost (<$75-100/BHP), field-installable (installation time <3 hours), remotely controlled, retrofit kit with integrated sensors for Integral Reciprocating Compressors used in production, gathering, transmission, and processing sections of the natural gas industry. The proposed technology helps to reduce emissions and improves operating efficiencies, combustion stability, and operational envelope of IRCs. This retrofit kit consists of 1) an air management system; 2) integrated sensors to collect data from the IRC; and 3) a cloud-connected control unit plus a graphical user-interface (GUI) or HMI. Since the parameters measured to control the AMS constitute true evidence of the IRC’s healthy operation, the cloud-connected feature facilitates remote monitoring of the IRC for preventative and predictive maintenance as an additional benefit to operators. The proposed project is a good demonstration of low-cost, field installable retrofit alternatives that can be employed to reduce emissions and enhance the performance of reciprocating compressors. The project demonstrates the application of smart devices that can be integrated with old and new assets to reduce their environmental footprint and enhance their performance. The proposed approach is expected to be desirable for a variety of large industrial integral compressors used in the natural gas industry.

Co-PI: Sridhar Radhakrishnan
School of Computer Science and Institute of Data Science and Analytics, Gallogly College of Engineering

Sridhar Radhakrishnan is a professor in and director of the School of Computer Science and co-director of the Institute of Data Science and Analytics, Gallogly College of Engineering. His research interests are in algorithm development and computer networks. His work has resulted in many protocol developments for broadband networks, wireless and mobile networks, and RFID systems. He is currently working on the development of protocols at the intersection of Internet-of-things (IOT) and Software Defined Networks. He also actively involved in the development of algorithms for high performance computing, especially on desktop parallel computing systems. He has published over 100 research articles in journals, conference proceedings and book chapters. 

Co-PI: Hamidreza Shabgard
School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

Hamidreza Shabgard is an assistant professor and director of the Multiphase Heat Transfer Laboratory at the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at OU. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Connecticut in 2014.  Shabgard’s research efforts are broadly related to the engineering aspects of energy and its production, transfer and consumption. Our awareness of energy and its crucial role in the modern societies is on rise. There is an increasing interest in using the energy resources more smartly and more responsibly as we are facing the consequences of the extensive use of fossil fuels. Development of competitive renewable energy resources, and performance improvement of the existing thermofluidic systems, are the key to transforming how the energy is generated and consumed. Shabgard’s research contributes to the quest for a more sustainable energy eco-system by focusing on multiphase flow and heat transfer and its application in energy systems. Some of the specific areas of Shabgard’s research include CFD, water treatment and desalination, thermal energy storage, thermal management, and heat pipes and thermosyphons. His research has been sponsored by federal and state agencies such as Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, the Department of Energy, the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology and several industries. He has published more than 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and holds five U.S. patent and pending patent applications. He is a member of ASME and ASTFE and has served as session chair in several ASME conferences.

Co-PI: Ramkumar Parthasarathy
School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering

Parthasarathy is an Anadarko Petroleum Corporation Presidential Professor in the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Gallogly College of Engineering.

My research background is in turbulent multiphase flows and combustion. I am currently working on two collaborative research projects sponsored by DoE aimed at reducing environmental pollution and improving sustainability. One project is focused on the development of integrated sensors along with an air management system to monitor and reduce emissions in reciprocating combustors that are widely used in the natural gas industry. The other project involves the development of a novel desalination method for the re-use of produced water that is a by-product of fracking.

Researcher Statements:

Lead PI: Amanda Regnier
Oklahoma Archeological Survey

Amanda Regnier, director of the Oklahoma Archeological Survey, is an archaeologist who specializes in the southeastern United States. Her current research in Oklahoma is focused on precontact Caddo sites in the Red and Arkansas drainage basins and on Removal Period military and plantation sites.  With OU colleagues Scott Hammerstedt at the survey and Patrick Livingood in the Department of Anthropology, Regnier has directed field projects at the Clement site, an A.D. 1050 through 1450 mound center in the Red River drainage of southeast Oklahoma, and at the Spiro Mounds Archaeological Site, along the Arkansas River in eastern Oklahoma. In addition to work in the Arkansas drainage, she also conducts research on antebellum sites in eastern Oklahoma, examining life on early frontier forts and the little-known plantation economy of eastern Oklahoma. She has also worked at plantation sites such as Rose Hill Plantation in Choctaw County and the Murrell Home in Cherokee County. Regnier recently conducted a geophysical survey, close-interval topographic mapping, and drone-based photogrammetry at the monumental center of Monte Alban in Oaxaca, Mexico, as part of a research team directed by Marc Levine of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at OU. 

Co-PI: Scott Sundermeyer
Oklahoma Archeological Survey

Scott Sundermeyer is a researcher at the Oklahoma Archeological Survey and serves as the director for the Oklahoma Department of Transportation's Cultural Resources Program, where his responsibilities include assisting the department in regulatory compliance with state and federal cultural resources laws. He has 20 years of experience in cultural resources practices. His efforts comprise research and fieldwork in archaeology and ethnohistory, encompassing extensive prehistoric and historic research in all five sub-areas of the Great Plains and Mogollon cultures of the Southwest. Sundemeyer has worked on projects in Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. He has participated in and directed archaeological field school projects in central and western Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and New Mexico. His field experience ranges from archival research to supervision of Phase I/II survey and testing and Phase III mitigation.  

Researcher Statement:

Lead PI: Robert Cichewicz
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, College of Arts and Sciences; Institute for Natural Products and Research Technologies (INPART)

Robert Cichewicz is a Regents’ Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and director of the Institute for Natural Products and Research Technologies in the College of Arts and Sciences.

My sincere appreciation is offered to OU OVPRP Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, Ph.D., for this recognition, as embodied by the Annual Award for Excellence in Research Grants. Since joining OU in 2005, the mission of my team (Natural Products Discovery Group) has been to identify new ways that natural products can be used to improve the lives of people, as well as to provide training for students and researchers interested in pursuing careers in the natural product sciences and drug discovery. These pursuits have relied on establishing and maintaining numerous collaborative efforts, and I have been fortunate to have the honor of working with incredible colleagues across many fields (encompassing pharmacology, agriculture, biology, parasitology, microbiology, mycology and medicine) and types of institutions (academic, industry and government). Engaging in this range of efforts has been made possible by the extraordinary determination of past and present Natural Products Discovery Group members (current members include Candace Coker, Jin Woo Lee, Karen Wendt, Maddie Huggins, Jason Draper, Vicky Anderson, Aayushi Chatterji, Thilini Peramuna, Allison Wright, Sarah Bonitatibus, Hagan Matlock, Michaela Murphy and Melvynn Mangione), citizen scientists (https://whatsinyourbackyard.org/), as well as many supportive individuals throughout the OU community (special thanks to Fares Najar, Bonnie VanWinkle, Gary Bates, Ron Halterman, David Robel, Steven Foster, Susan Nimmo, DeAnna Stone, Doug Powell, Carl Van Buskirk, Jeff Jackson, Chris Corbett, Gina McMillen, Regina McNabb, Stephanie Mudd, Andrew Pollock, Ruth Ann Shaffer, Meredith Wilkerson, and many more). Thank you to everyone for their hard work and for sharing their talents with us!

Researcher Statement:

Lead PI: Bruce Hoagland
Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences

Bruce Hoagland joined the OU faculty in 1996. He holds a joint appointment as a professor and associate chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability in the College of Atmospheric Sciences and the Oklahoma Biological Survey, where he serves as a plant ecologist and coordinator of the Oklahoma Natural Heritage Inventory. His research interests include vegetation classification and mapping, analysis of plant species distributions, reconstruction of historical vegetation, and floristic surveys. Major projects at this time include an atlas of the flora of Oklahoma, reconstruction of vegetation of Murray County, Oklahoma (from 1871 and 1897 General Land Office Survey data), and an inventory of wetland plant communities in western Oklahoma.