EAST LANSING, Mich. — Michigan State University’s Jongeun Choi, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and of Electrical and Computer Engineering,has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award.

The CAREER award, one of NSF’s most prestigious and competitive awards for junior researchers, recognizes those who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.

“These CAREER awards are tangible expressions of validation from Jongeun’s peers concerning his research goals and plans,” said Satish Udpa, dean of MSU’s College of Engineering. “I am delighted to see his peers confirm that he is on a very productive research trajectory.”

Jongeun Choi received a five-year $400,000 grant.

Choi’s work is in developing and analyzing distributed learning and cooperative control algorithms so that a network of mobile sensing vehicles ¬¬– such as robots ¬¬– can gather data and learn an unknown field of interest in order to perform specific tasks. Choi’s research has applications in the environmental sciences.

Due to recent and drastic global climate changes, it is necessary to monitor the changing ecosystems over vast regions on land, in our oceans, and in our lakes, Choi said.

“Emerging technologies in robotic sensor networks and field prediction algorithms can offer great potential to deal with such issues,” he said. “The main purpose of my work is to develop control algorithms for a network of mobile sensing vehicles to explore and predict an unknown field of interest.”

Applications include prediction and tracing of harmful algal blooms in lakes, toxic contaminants in public water systems and pollutants in the air. “For instance, tracing and predicting harmful algal blooms in a lake could be accomplished using proposed algorithms and a network of autonomous underwater vehicles with fluorescence-based sensors,” Choi said.