ITHACA, N.Y. -- Katerina Papoulia, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development Program grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). She will receive five-year funding of $408,890 to support her research.

Early Career awards are the NSF's most prestigious honor for new faculty members, recognizing and supporting teacher-scholars who are considered most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.

Papoulia received a civil engineering diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 1979; an M.Sc. in structural engineering from the University of Southampton, England, in 1982; and an M.A. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in engineering, both in 1992, from the University of California-Berkeley.

She joined the Cornell faculty in August 1999 from the Institute of Engineering Seismology and Earthquake Engineering, Thessaloniki, Greece, where she had worked as an assistant research scientist from 1996 to 1999. Previously she was senior development engineer at MacNeal-Schwendler Corp. and held contract research appointments at Lawrence Berkeley and Argonne national laboratories.

Her research concentrates on computational mechanics and its application to structural problems. One focus area is the study of large, time-dependent deformations of elastomeric materials under long-term and cyclic loads. Her original interest in these materials arose from their applicability to vibration isolators, which can be used to protect structures from seismic damage. Recently she began research into the use of fiber-reinforced elastomers in biological applications, such as artificial arteries.

She also studies material failure under dynamic and cyclic loads at different length scales. One approach is a probabilistic model showing how material structures change over time. The work includes the development of physically based models and robust numerical algorithms. This work is funded by a NASA University Research Engineering and Technology Institute grant to a Cornell engineering group for the development of advanced materials for the next generation of NASA space vehicles, and by the NSF.

She will use her NSF Early Career grant for a research and teaching program on rate-dependent damage and fracture in glass and glassy composite materials. The research will attempt to understand and model toughening mechanisms in glass-polymeric materials. Applications include the development of safety window glazings to protect against blast and impact loads.