DARPA marks 20 years of Young Faculty Awards, names new Director’s Fellows

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has named seven members of its 2024 Young Faculty Award cohort to receive the program’s Director’s Fellowship, adding a third year of support worth up to $500,000 for researchers who have excelled against initial goals. The extension is intended to build on early results, deepen the research, and sustain collaboration with the agency.

Recipients and project titles:
– Jairo Diaz Amaya, Rochester Institute of Technology — “Osmotic Signalers for Functional Materials”
– Ognjen Ilic, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities — “Ultralightweight Nanophotonic Radiators for Adaptive and High-Power Heat Rejection”
– Yang Lin, University of Rhode Island — “Precision in Miniature: Revolutionizing MPS with Digital Acoustofluidics and Nanoscale 3D Printing”
– Thirimadura Charith Mendis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — “Language and Hardware Adaptive Representations and Techniques for Compiling Heterogeneous Workloads”
– Samuel Oliveira, North Carolina A&T State University — “Spatial-temporal Dynamics for Predictive Multiscale Models of Multi-cellular Circuit”
– Savio Poovathingal, University of Kentucky — “Gas-surface scattering dynamics in very low Earth orbit”
– Carter Yagemann, Ohio State University — “End-to-End Modeling and Mitigation of Fault Injection Attacks”

Now in its 20th year, the Young Faculty Award program has supported more than 500 emerging researchers from over 60 universities. The initiative focuses on early-career U.S. academics, coupling funding with mentorship and industry/government connections to orient promising ideas toward national security needs.

DARPA also said its 2026 YFA class has been selected for negotiation of potential awards. This cycle introduces an option to fund a U.S. person graduate student in a supporting role on a YFA project, with as much as $350,000 available, aimed at expanding the pipeline of personnel eligible for future classified work. Formal announcements of 2026 awardees are expected in August or September, pending contract negotiations.

The research announcement seeking YFA applications for 2027 is slated to appear on grants.gov and sam.gov in early fall 2026.