MSU Bagley College of Engineering continues national impact with faculty NSF CAREER Awards
Contact: Mary Pollitz
STARKVILLE, Miss.—Two Mississippi State University faculty members in the Bagley College of Engineering are recent National Science Foundation CAREER Award winners, securing more than $1 million in combined federal funding to advance research in emergency response simulations and global space observation.
Seunghan Lee, assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Junming Diao, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, each earned the prestigious five-year awards. Lee received more than $516,000 for his work with human-robot emergency response, while Diao received about $549,200 to develop distributed radio astronomy networks.
Lee’s project “AI-Driven Simulation Framework for Human-Autonomy Planning, Adaptive Control, and Immersive Virtual Reality Training” focuses on improving the safety and efficiency of human-robot collaboration in firefighting and emergency-response operations.
“The overarching goal is to establish a unified, AI-driven simulation framework,” Lee said. “The framework will help firefighters and robots share information, assess risks, make safer decisions and train for high-risk emergency situations.”
By incorporating changing fire and environmental conditions, virtual reality training components and AI-driven simulations, Lee’s research aims to simulate complex fire and emergency-response scenarios and directly support first responders.
“Receiving this award is a tremendous honor because it gives me the opportunity to turn that aspiration into a larger, integrated research program and take another step toward supporting our communities through work with firefighters,” Lee said.
Diao’s project “A Distributed Radio Telescope Powered by Global IoT Networks: Low Cost, High-Performance and Spectrum Sharing,” aims to connect millions of everyday Internet of Things, or IoT, devices to form a single radio telescope array.
“If you can get billions of ordinary devices to listen to the sky at the same moment and combine what they hear correctly, the planet itself becomes the telescope,” he said.
The concept builds on Diao’s doctoral research at Brigham Young University, as well as his experience as an antenna engineer on the Apple Watch project, where he analyzed the inner workings of consumer electronics hardware. His proposed framework addresses the growing friction between wireless communication and astronomical observation.
“Astronomy and wireless communication are fighting over the same airwaves, and satellite constellations have made that much worse in the past few years,” Diao said. “The usual answer is to keep the two apart with protected quiet zones, which is a losing battle. My system is designed so they can coexist instead.”
The NSF CAREER Award supports early-career faculty who serve as academic role models in research and education while leading advances in the mission of their department or organization.
MSU’s Bagley College of Engineering is online at www.bagley.msstate.edu and can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube at @msuengineering.
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