Defense prize aids UA team research
Professor named fellowship winner
FAYETTEVILLE — Laurent Bellaiche, a physics professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, has been named a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow, considered by the U.S. Department of Defense its most prestigious award to individual researchers.
The fellowship comes with $3 million over five years and aims to help researchers pursue “cutting-edge fundamental research projects,” according to the Defense Department.
Bellaiche joined UA’s faculty in 1999 and studies what are known as ferroics, which he described in a statement as materials that transform their atomic or magnetic structure based on temperature or certain applied conditions.
“It is the most prestigious award I have received,” Bellaiche said in an email.
The fellowships were created in 2008 and renamed in 2016 to honor Bush, leader of the World War II-era Office of Scientific Research and Development.
“This is the first time the award has gone to a recipient at the University of Arkansas, and the first
one in the state of Arkansas,” Lt. Col. Robert Carver, a Department of Defense spokesman, said in a statement.
Past honors for Bellaiche include a 2019 SEC Faculty Achievement Award, which goes to one professor at each of the 14 member schools in the Southeastern Conference.
In 2017, Bellaiche was named a fellow by the Arkansas Research Alliance, a public-private partnership that seeks to recruit and retain top science researchers.
“Winning this [Bush] fellowship will allow us to significantly broaden the scope of our fundamental research related to the topology of ferroic matter and to pursue several high-risk ‘blue-sky’ ideas that would have been otherwise impossible to develop,” Bellaiche and his research team said in joint statement.
Bellaiche and his team described their work as involving multiple research disciplines, including topology, a branch of mathematics they described as useful in distinguishing between certain shapes.
Bellaiche, who earned his doctorate from the University of Paris, is one of eight fellows selected this year after the Defense Department received more than 200 “white papers” and invited 35 to give full proposals, according to this year’s announcement.
Bellaiche credited Yousra Nahas and Sergei Prokhorenko, two UA research assistant professors, with doing much of the writing on the proposal submitted for the fellowship.
The fellowship helps researchers pursue basic, experimental work, but the team described possible applications relating to certain types of sensors as well as advanced computing.
The work “could enable a leap in low-field magnetic sensing technologies as well as ground-breaking advances in cryptography and neuromorphic computing (that mimics how the human brain functions),” the team said in a statement.
The team explained to the Democrat-Gazette that this could lead to the development of computers that are faster and, in the case of neuromorphic computing, able to adapt in ways that can lead to developments in artificial intelligence.
The work leads to discoveries of “novel states of matter” that “are very promising for technological applications,” the researchers said in their statement.