New trustee chair Ayman Abouraddy and reappointees Aristide Dogariu and Jayanta Kapat are among a handful of faculty members to have achieved the distinguished honor, which helps to retain and attract exceptional faculty. Established in 2003 by former UCF President John C. Hitt, are appointed for five years and receive a $50,000 annual stipend to advance their scholarship. Half of the stipend can be used as a salary supplement.

Deans nominate trustee chair , who are evaluated by a Trustee Chair Review Committee and affirmed by UCF’s president and provost.

“Talented and renowned faculty — such as those named as trustee chairs — are the foundation of UCF’s academic excellence and key to us reaching our goals as a top public metropolitan research university,” says UCF President Alexander N. Cartwright. “We are grateful for these honored faculty and their impact in their respective fields and in the lives of our students. We look forward to their continued success and how they will further distinguish our university.”

The new terms begin in August. Here’s more about the most recent appointees, starting with new trustee chair Abouraddy from the College of Optics and Photonics.

Abouraddy joined UCF as an assistant professor in 2008. He has since established facilities for fabricating new classes of polymer and soft-glass fibers for applications ranging from mid-infrared optics to solar energy concentration. He is currently engaged in a new research area that he has pioneered known as “space-time optics and photonics,” which has led to major breakthroughs in optical physics over the past five years. He is a popular classroom teacher and an outstanding advisor to research students at the graduate and undergraduate levels. He earned a Ph.D. from Boston şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą in electrical engineering and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In nominating him, David Hagan, dean of the College of Optics and Photonics, said: “Dr. Abouraddy is an unusually outstanding scientist whose work has opened up new fields of study, and consequently has attracted research collaborations of the highest caliber. His work has been consistently published in high-impact journals and these publications have been highly cited. As a result, he has been able to build large, funded research programs that support his group and other collaborators at UCF as well as at other universities across the United States.”

A Pegasus Professor in the College of Optics and Photonics, reappointee Dogariu’s research ranges from understanding fundamental aspects of light interaction with matter to actively developing new optical technology for sensing and measurement for a substance like blood. Dogariu created a new technology to monitor patient’s blood by using light scattering. He other honors include being a distinguished researcher in the College of Optics and Photonics. He earned his Ph.D. in engineering from Hokkaido şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą in Japan and joined UCF as a research professor in 1997.

In his nomination for Dogariu, Hagan said: “Dr. Dogariu is an exceptional professor who has performed outstanding research aimed at both fundamental understanding and the development of unique and impactful applications. At the same time, he is a dedicated teacher both in the classroom and in the research laboratory. His work and its applications have impacted a broad range of science and he has had a positive impact on many others at UCF, though his many collaborations on biomedical photonics, particularly with junior faculty. He has also developed many collaborations with leading researchers worldwide.”

Kapat, a reappointee from the College of Engineering and Computer Science, is the founding director of the Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research or CATER, and associate director for Florida Center for Advanced Aero-Propulsion, a hub for research and development of advanced turbomachinery and energy systems. He joined UCF in 1997 and has been recognized for his valuable leadership, scholarly research of national and international impact and outstanding teaching and service. He earned his Doctorate of Science in Mechanical Engineering from MIT.

In nominating him, Michael Georgopoulous, dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science, said: “Most notably, Professor Kapat’s excellence is a driver for the success of so many faculty and students around him and is a source of strength for the mechanical and aerospace Department … and our university. The most significant impact of Professor Kapat stems from his vision for CATER. … His unique vision has brought together 10 core faculty members with multidisciplinary capabilities that provide a synergistic approach, like no other, towards solving some of the most complex research problems in Turbomachinery for Power Generation, Aviation and Space Propulsion.”

The appointments align with UCF’s goals of retaining and recruiting outstanding faculty in its strategic plan, “Unleashing Potential: Becoming the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą for the Future.”

The grants were part of the DOD awarding of $50 million to 85 institutions across the nation in the Fiscal Year 2021 Defense şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą Research Instrumentation Program.

The recipients and their projects are:

• Ayman Abouraddy, professor in the College of Optics and Photonics – Studying Classical Optical Entanglement in Space and Time, $347,786 from the Office of Naval Research.
• Brian Kim, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering – Massively Parallel Bio-Security and Bio-Computing Research Using In Vivo Neurotransmitters and Synaptic Transmission, $301,207 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
• Subith Vasu Sumathi, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering – Micro/Macro (PIV/LIF) High Speed System for Heat Transfer Experiments, $381,311 from the Office of Naval Research.

“These awards represent continued recognition by the Department of Defense of UCF’s critical contribution to science and technology,” says Michael Macedonia, assistant vice president for research. “It also is a recognition of the leadership of our faculty and their novel ideas to advance research in support of national security.”

The Department of Defense seeks specific proposals from university investigators conducting foundational science and engineering research relevant to national defense.

Through the DURIP awards, the DOD supports purchases of research equipment to boost the United States’ science, technology, engineering and mathematics workforce.

“DURIP awards help maintain the cutting-edge capabilities of our universities and provide research infrastructure to enable the most creative scientific minds in the country to extend the boundaries of science and technology,” says Bindu Nair, director, Basic Research Office, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. “The awards will facilitate scientific advances that will drive unparalleled military capabilities for our country and help train our future STEM workforce.”

The annual award process is highly competitive. For the FY 2021 competition, the service research offices received 742 proposals requesting $297 million in funding.

UCF Optics and Photonics researcher, Bob Crabbs, also received a 2020 DOD award in August for $384,442. The grant was to provide instrumentation to expand and improve atmospheric monitoring capabilities in support of UCF’s High Energy Laser and laser communications.

Crabbs is the facility manager and principal investigator at the university’s Townes Institute Science and Technology Experimentation Facility at Kennedy Space Center.

Using a pair of pliers in each hand and gradually pulling taut a piece of glass fiber coated in plastic, associate professor Ayman Abouraddy found that something unexpected and never before documented occurred – the inner fiber fragmented in an orderly fashion.

“What we expected to see happen is NOT what happened,” he said. “While we thought the core material would snap into two large pieces, instead it broke into many equal-sized pieces.”

He referred to the technique in the Nature article as “Breaking Me Softly.”

The process of pulling fibers to force the realignment of the molecules that hold them together, known as cold drawing, has been the standard for mass production of flexible fibers like plastic and nylon for most of the last century.

Abouraddy and his team have shown that the process may also be applicable to multi-layered materials, a finding that could lead to the manufacturing of a new generation of materials with futuristic attributes.

“Advanced fibers are going to be pursuing the limits of anything a single material can endure today,” Abouraddy said.

For example, packaging together materials with optical and mechanical properties along with sensors that could monitor such vital sign as blood pressure and heart rate would make it possible to make clothing capable of transmitting vital data to a doctor’s office via the Internet.

The ability to control breakage in a material is critical to developing computerized processes for potential manufacturing, said Yuanli Bai, a fracture mechanics specialist in UCF’s College of Engineering and Computer Science.

Abouraddy contacted Bai, who is a co-author on the paper, about three years ago and asked him to analyze the test results on a wide variety of materials, including silicon, silk, gold and even ice.

He also contacted Robert S. Hoy, a şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of South Florida physicist who specializes in the properties of materials like glass and plastic, for a better understanding of what he found.

Hoy said he had never seen the phenomena Abouraddy was describing, but that it made great sense in retrospect.

The research takes what has traditionally been a problem in materials manufacturing and turned it into an asset, Hoy said.

“Dr. Abouraddy has found a new application of necking” –  a process that occurs when cold drawing causes non-uniform strain in a material, Hoy said. “Usually you try to prevent necking, but he exploited it to do something potentially groundbreaking.”

The necking phenomenon was discovered decades ago at DuPont and ushered in the age of textiles and garments made of synthetic fibers.

Abouraddy said that cold-drawing is what makes synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester useful. While those fibers are initially brittle, once cold-drawn, the fibers toughen up and become useful in everyday commodities. This discovery at DuPont at the end of the 1920s ushered in the age of textiles and garments made of synthetic fibers.

Only recently have fibers made of multiple materials become possible, he said. That research will be the centerpiece of a $317 Million U.S. Department of Defense program focused on smart fibers that Abouraddy and UCF will assist with. The Revolutionary Fibers and Textiles Manufacturing Innovation Institute (RFT-MII), led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will incorporate research findings published in the Nature paper, Abouraddy said.

The implications for manufacturing of the smart materials of the future are vast.

By controlling the mechanical force used to pull the fiber and therefore controlling the breakage patterns, materials can be developed with customized properties allowing them to interact with each other and eternal forces such as the sun (for harvesting energy) and the internet in customizable ways.

A co-author on the paper, Ali P. Gordon, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and director of UCF’s Mechanics of Materials Research Group said that the finding is significant because it shows that by carefully controlling the loading condition imparted to the fiber, materials can be developed with tailored performance attributes.

“Processing-structure-property relationships need to be strategically characterized for complex material systems. By combining experiments, microscopy, and computational mechanics, the physical mechanisms of the fragmentation process were more deeply understood,” Gordon said.

Abouraddy teamed up with seven UCF scientists from the College of Optics & Photonics and the College of Engineering & Computer Science (CECS) to write the paper. Additional authors include one researcher each from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nanyang Technological şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą in Singapore and the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of South Florida.

Authors are Abouraddy, graduate students Joshua J. Kaufman, Guangming Tao and Soroush Shabahang from CREOL- The College of Optics and Photonics at UCF, Yangyang Qiao, Yuanli Bai, Ali P. Gordon and Thomas Bouchenot from the College of Engineering & Computer Science at UCF, Robert S. Hoy from the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą of South Florida, Yoel Fink from MIT and Lei Wei from Nanyang şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą, Singapore.

Abouraddy calls the “mistake” the student had observed a “fantastic failure,” infused with serendipity. This particle fabrication method can potentially disrupt a variety of industries, impacting everyday items such as paints and sunscreens. You can read more about it in this month’s Patent Trending blog (to be published on Thursday, May 5th).

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Prior to his time at MIT, he attended Boston şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą, where he received his Ph.D. in Optics. This rare melding of materials science and optics is the basis of Abouraddy’s research.

“It allows me to uniquely combine two differing areas of knowledge, and it came in very handy in what we did. In any new discovery, if it’s a real discovery, it’s going to be in an area you don’t know anything about. We need to have a broad scientific background, an ability to catch up and make up for the missing knowledge,” he said.

And, to fill in the knowledge gap, Abouraddy’s work is driven by the pursuit of the invigorating “a-ha!” moment.

“I like to understand things. I’m always bothered by contradictions or things that don’t add up. Uncovering what we don’t understand is very challenging, but very rewarding. That pleasure that comes from suddenly understanding how something works is what drives me,” he said.

This single-minded curiosity was something fostered from his youth. As a child, Abouraddy liked to build things. He was especially obsessed with LEGOS and built large houses with them. Abouraddy grew up in an academic family. His father was the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Alexandria şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą in Egypt. In Britain, he attended a school with a strong emphasis in the sciences and was a top student. Throughout his younger days, he was always involved in some aspect of math and science.

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What drew Abouraddy to UCF was the amount of latitude he’s given for his research.

“UCF is a young university, so there are more opportunities for growth and independence. So we’re growing together, and that level of freedom has allowed me to grow organically,” he said.

For Abouraddy, even the labs in CREOL reflect the organic nature of research at UCF.

“Our labs are distributed all over the building. Whereas at a typical university, you get some lab space, and then you have to wait for an eternity for any extra space, if you grow,” he said.

Abouraddy believes that this freedom provides more opportunities for collaboration and mentorship.

“I have quite a bit of collaboration within CREOL and within UCF: with people in physics, and in biomedical, mechanical, and electrical engineering. This extended network of collaboration has helped our research,” he stated.

Abouraddy’s Ph.D. adviser at Boston şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą is now the dean of CREOL, , and has afforded him a virtually continuous mentorship throughout his career.

“The mentorship aspect has been very fulfilling here. I’ve been mentored by other senior faculty, whom I am very lucky to have as collaborators and as mentors. That’s allowed for a level of growth that I didn’t expect before I came here,” Abouraddy reflected.

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Abouraddy’s research fuses the fields of material science and optics to create new innovations with the potential to positively affect our everyday lives. His new fabrication method is currently available for licensing. To learn more, contact John Miner.

The discoveries – each of them unrelated – will be presented at the 2015 TechConnect World Innovation Conference in Washington, D.C., from June 14-17. The annual event is designed to accelerate the commercialization of innovations out of the lab and into industry, and draws some of the brightest and most innovative researchers, funding agencies, national labs, international research organizations, universities, investors and corporate partners.

The şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą discoveries are among the top 20 percent of submittals selected to receive TechConnect Innovation Awards. The technologies include:

Another member of the UCF faculty, Jayan Thomas, will speak at the conference. Thomas, an assistant professor with the NanoScience Technology Center, the College of Optics and Photonics and the , was a finalist for a prestigious 2014 World Technology Network Award for his research on cables that can store and transmit energy.

Soroush Shabahang, a graduate student in CREOL (The College of Optics & Photonics), made the finding that could ultimately change the way pharmaceuticals are produced and delivered.

The discovery was based on using heat to break up long, thin fibers into tiny, proportionally sized seeds, which have the capability to hold multiple types of materials locked in place. The work, published in the July 18 issue of Nature, opens the door to a world of applications.

Craig Arnold, associate professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą and an expert in laser material interactions who did not work on the project, said no one else in the field has been able to accomplish this feat.

With a new non-chemical method of creating identical particles of any size in large quantities, “the possible applications are up to your imagination,” Arnold said. 

The most immediate prospect is the creation of particles capable of drug delivery that could, for example, combine different agents for fighting a tumor. Or it could combine a time-release component with medications that will only activate once they reach their target–infected cells.

“With this approach you can make a very sophisticated structure with no more effort than creating the simplest of structures,” said Ayman Abouraddy, an assistant professor at CREOL and Shabahang’s mentor and advisor. Abouraddy has spent his career, first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now at UCF, studying the fabrication of multimaterial fibers.

The technique relies on heat to break molten fibers into spherical droplets. Imagine water dripping from a faucet. Glass fibers are perhaps best known as the cylindrical cables that transmit digital information over long distances.  For year, scientists have been looking for ways to improve the purity of glass fibers to allow for faster, disruption-free transmission of light waves. 

Shabahang and fellow graduate student Joshua Kaufman were working on just such a project, heating and stretching glass fiber on a homemade tapering machine. Shabahang noticed that instead of the desired result of making the center of the cable thinner, the material actually broke apart into multiple miniature spheres.

“It was kind of a failure to me,” Shabahang said. 

However, when Abouraddy heard what had happened he knew right away that this “mistake” was a major breakthrough.

While at MIT, Abouraddy and his mentor, Yoel Fink, a professor of materials science and current director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, said they were told by a theoretician that molten optical fiber should align with a process known as Rayleigh instability, which explains what causes a falling stream of fluid to break into droplets.  

At the time, the MIT group was focused on producing fibers containing multiple materials. The team produced fibers by heating a scale model called a “preform” and stretching it apart much the way taffy is made. The process is known as thermal drawing.

Shabahang’s experiment shows that by heating and then cooling multimaterial fibers, the theoretical became reality. Uniform particles that look like droplets are produced. Moreover, Shabahang demonstrated that once the spheres form, additional materials can be added and locked into place like LEGO building blocks, resulting in particles with sophisticated internal structures.

Especially significant is the creation of “beach ball” particles consisting of two different materials melded together in alternating fashion, similar to the stripes on a beach ball.

Kaufman, Shabahang and Abouraddy contributed to the Nature article in addition to Guangming Tao from CREOL, UCF; Esmaeil-Hooman Banaei from the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, UCF; Daosheng S. Deng, Department of Chemical Engineering, MIT; Xiangdong Liang, Department of Mathematics, MIT; Steven G. Johnson, Department of Mathematics, MIT; and Yoel Fink from MIT.

Some of the funding for the project was made available by the National Science Foundation, the Oak Ridge Associated Universities through a Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

The Nature paper is available here: