Out of 407 applicants, 39 of the nation’s brightest young scientists were selected to receive grants totaling $11.7M under this year’s DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) program. YFA recipients apply grants of approximately $300,000 toward a wide spectrum of basic research at universities.

Three of the 39 awards went to Georgia Tech faculty, which is more than any other university. College of Engineering assistant professor, Mark Styczynski, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, was one of the recipients for his effort  , "Identifying Allosteric Metabolite-Protein Interactions for Engineering Therapeutics," in the topic area of New Physical Methods for Biological Characterization and Control.

Through YFA, DARPA identifies outstanding junior faculty members and exposes them to DoD, its needs and DARPA’s program development process.  YFA combines funding, mentoring and networking with industry and DoD early in a recipient’s career to help them in framing future research in the context of defense needs.

Applicants for YFA grants were required to be within 5 years of appointment to a tenure track position at a U.S. university. Selected researchers receive grants to develop and validate their research ideas over a period of two years. Including this year’s recipients, 168 faculty have received grants since the YFA program began in 2006.