Professor Chris Van de Walle receives the 2022 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship

Chris Van de Walle, a distinguished professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Materials Department, has received a 2022 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (VBFF) from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), one of only nine such fellowships awarded this year. The five-year fellowship, considered the DoD’s most prestigious single-investigator award, is aimed at advancing transformative, university-based fundamental research and includes over $2.5 million in funding. Van de Walle will develop new computational approaches to enhance the efficiency of electronic and optoelectronic devices based on wide-bandgap semiconductors.

“I am extremely honored to be selected for this award,” Van de Walle said. “I have been very grateful for the support that DoD has provided for a number of my previous and ongoing research projects, but the freedom and five-year time horizon of the VBFF will allow me to pursue approaches that do not fit within the frame of typical, more focused, three-year grants.”

Van de Walle joins an elite cadre of approximately fifty VB fellows from across the country, including three professors in UCSB’s Materials Department, Chris Palmstrom (2015 Fellow), Susanne Stemmer (2016 Fellow), and Tresa Pollock (2017 Fellow).