March 13, 2026
Congratulations to the following PSD faculty members who have received NSF CAREER Awards. According to the NSF, the prestigious CAREER award supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Elizabeth Jerison
An assistant professor in Physics, Elizabeth Jerison received an award for her project, “A Dynamical Systems Framework for Systemic Inflammatory Response.”
Jerison is a biological physicist who studies immunity. Her work aims to develop mathematical frameworks that describe states of the immune system, and how cellular interactions give rise to these states, with a focus on inflammatory response. Her research group combines experimental and computational approaches and uses zebrafish as their primary biological model system. This system enables high-throughput genomics experiments and live imaging of immune responses within the transparent larvae.
This award will fund experiments and AI/ML-driven computation to build a dynamical systems framework for systemic inflammatory responses. These dramatic organism-wide immune flares can be lethal, and much remains unknown about how their dynamics are controlled. Jerison’s team will use genomics and imaging-based experiments to trace trajectories of these responses in the zebrafish and develop models to predict and alter the course of these trajectories. The award will also support education and outreach, including by extending collaborative learning and physics of living systems curriculum into intro physics major courses.
Zoe Yan
A Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in Physics and the James Franck Institute, Zoe Yan received an award for her project, “Ultrapolar Molecules: New Opportunities for Quantum Simulation.”
Quantum mechanics shapes how systems behave at every scale, from the dynamics of neutron stars to the rearrangement of electrons during chemical reactions. Yan and her group will use ultracold quantum gases—atoms or molecules cooled to nearly absolute zero temperature—to study and simulate such systems. A major recent advance has been the use of ultracold polar molecules, whose strong, tunable interactions provide powerful control over their internal states and motion. The next step is to produce more strongly interacting types of polar molecules (silver-potassium), to reach the interaction strengths needed to explore exotic new states of matter. This could be a viable pathway to reveal microscopic details behind topological p+ip superfluids, dipolar supersolids, and dipolar quantum spin liquids.