Impact and Honor

Elite CAREER Awards spur high-level research by young Baylor faculty

For young researchers at institutions across the nation, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) CAREER Award is one of the most coveted honors they can pursue. The competitive honor and its commensurate research funding supports recipient research and elevates that work in the higher education community.

Since 2020, nine Baylor faculty members have earned CAREER awards, which has supported research impacting healthcare, technology and more — work that is ongoing in ways that benefit both the research community and communities like Waco in which the research is conducted.

Mechanical engineering researcher earns latest award

This year, Clayton Mulvihill, Ph.D., assistant professor of mechanical engineering, became the latest Baylor researcher to be awarded. The five-year, nearly $600,000 award will fund Mulvihill’s research focused on understanding the individual reactions that take place in systems containing hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen — which almost any combustion engine on the planet uses. 

“To earn this award was a great surprise,” Mulvihill said. “The biggest application of the information we’re pursuing is for engineers who design devices that involve these reactions, like gas turbines for airplanes, ground-based power generation or other types of engines. They can use the information we give them to design a better, more efficient or cleaner engine.”

For Mulvihill, the CAREER Award journey is just beginning. At his lab in the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative (BRIC), he and his students will utilize high-tech equipment with laser diagnostics to meet the award’s goals. 

For his colleagues who previously earned the award, many are seeing the fruits of their labor in meaningful ways.

Multi-year impact of CAREER Awards

While the awards generate much excitement among faculty and their colleagues for the significance and prestige of the honor, it’s what takes place long after the initial announcement that makes the greatest difference.

Ashley Barrett, B.A. ’07, M.A. ’09, Ph.D., professor of communication, became the first Baylor humanities professor to earn the honor in 2022. Her project, studying the impact of technology on compassionate communication in healthcare systems, aims to provide healthcare practitioners and patients with tools to promote compassionate communication in evolving patient-provider interactions. Now, more than three years into her work, Barrett has gathered significant data from her partners at Waco Family Medicine and is gathering data at Waco’s Baylor Scott & White Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center. In addition to journal articles gleaned from her ongoing work, she’s building interventions, tools and curriculum to advance compassionate healthcare that serves patients well in organizations. For Barrett, a native Wacoan, the chance to do that work with organizations in her hometown is meaningful.

Elyssia Gallagher, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, earned a CAREER Award in 2020. She won the award for her work focused on glycans — biomolecules that impact the body’s ability to resist infection from viruses and bacteria. Six years after pursuing a course of research seeking to analyze and understand these notoriously challenging biomolecules, Gallagher is grateful to have made significant inroads of understanding that can influence drug development.

“We have been able to develop a series of methods that allow us to look at structural differences,” Gallagher said, “as well as their dynamics and how flexible they are. These methods weren’t possible when we started the grants, and now some of them are possible.”

Past recipients mention the benefits to their students as well. These faculty members — described by the NSF as researchers who “have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization” — share that work with their students, providing them with the chance to build on the nationally recognized work.