Tyler Tallman has racked up another major award. Just a few short months after receiving a Young Investigators Research Program grant, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has accepted associate professor Tallman's proposal to their Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. He believes his group's inverse research on self-sensing materials could result in a more usable technology.

"By inverting the relationship between electrical changes and mechanical loading in these materials, it is possible to know the full-field mechanics from only a small number of electrical measurements. This research will discover the basic nature of this inverse problem, which will lead to more accurate, more robust, and faster solutions," he writes. "Due to the wide range of materials that exhibit conductivity-deformation coupling, this can positively affect a large number of applications such as structural sensing, soft robotics, biomedical imaging, and geospatial prospecting."

He has also worked with other campus departments in order to create an education and outreach ecosystem at Purdue in support of self-sensing materials research. Through connections he's made with the Society of Women Engineers and the Women in Engineering Program at Purdue, he established the ability to "integrate self-sensing mechanics into outreach activities serving the greater Lafayette/West Lafayette area."

Tallman believes this program will positively impact a diverse cohort of undergraduate students by providing research opportunities and a mentoring network.