Jie Gu Receives Prestigious NSF CAREER Award

Northwestern Engineering’s Jie Gu and Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences’s Julia Kalow each have received the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the foundation’s most prestigious honor for junior faculty members.

The CAREER Award is designed to support promising young faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholar through the combination of outstanding research and education.

Gu is an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science in the McCormick School of Engineering. He will receive $566,880 over five years from NSF’s Division of Computing and Communication Foundations to develop a systematic design approach for time-domain computing. 

Gu’s research group develops novel computing methods that combine digital and mixed-signal circuit technology to enable ultra-low power, ultra-efficient computing. His technologies have potential applications in real-time machine learning, artificial intelligence, or Internet-of-things devices.

Before joining Northwestern in 2015, Gu was a researcher and developer at Texas Instruments.

Kalow is an assistant professor of chemistry in Weinberg. She will receive $700,000 over five years from NSF’s Division of Chemistry to study how light can be used to control the formation and breakage of reversible chemical bonds in polymer networks.