Caltech Faculty Receive NSF CAREER Awards
Five Caltech faculty members have been selected to receive the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award starting this year.
CAREER awards, the NSF's most prestigious awards for junior faculty members, are designed to enable awardees to develop careers as outstanding teacher-scholars. Awardees are chosen because they "exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations," according to the NSF.
Jane Bae (BS '11), assistant professor of aerospace and Susan Wu Scholar
Jane Bae (BS '11) studies the physical mechanisms that produce turbulence and develops accurate models that simulate the complex dynamics at play in turbulent flows, such as those near wind farms or around aircraft. The models can then inform simulations capable of improving designs and improving predictions of atmospheric flows. Bae, who is also a Wu Scholar, is particularly interested in applying machine learning, data science, and other novel methods to turbulence modeling.
After earning her undergraduate degree in math at Caltech in 2011, Bae completed graduate work in computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford University. She completed postdoctoral appointments at Caltech and Harvard University before joining the Caltech faculty as an assistant professor of aerospace in 2021.
Kareem El-Badry, associate professor of astronomy
Kareem El-Badry is an astronomer interested in binary stars, black holes, and related stellar phenomena. He has made numerous discoveries involving stars and black holes using datasets from large astronomical surveys. In a recent study, he describes the first-known "black hole triple," a system of three stars, one of which is a black hole. Some of El-Badry's recent findings include the 2024 unveiling of 21 hidden neutron stars orbiting around stars like our Sun. These hidden neutron stars were spotted indirectly through gravitational wobbles induced in their partner stars. And in 2022, El-Badry and his colleagues discovered the closest known black hole to Earth, lying about 1,600 light-years away.
El-Badry attended Yale University as an undergraduate and earned his PhD in astrophysics from UC Berkeley. Before coming to Caltech in 2024, he held a postdoctoral position at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 2025, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
Elias Most, assistant professor of theoretical astrophysics and William H. Hurt Scholar
In a recent study, Elias Most and his team elucidated the radio emission mechanism for long-period radio transients from binary stars. In another set of papers, Most and his colleagues used supercomputer simulations to track what happens when a black hole swallows a neutron star whole. Their calculations demonstrated that in addition to gravitational waves, these systems can potentially produce some of the strongest "monster" shock waves in the universe, leading to the formation of an exotic, previously hypothesized "black hole pulsar."
Most received his bachelor's degree from the University of Göttingen in 2013, and his PhD from Goethe University Frankfurt in 2020, and was a predoctoral fellow at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics. Before joining Caltech in 2023, he held joint postdoctoral positions at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study.
Trevor Nolan, assistant professor of biology and biological engineering
Trevor Nolan's research focuses on how the cells that make up a plant's roots send signals to one another and adapt to their environments. In multicellular organisms, the growth and function of organs depend on precise coordination and communication among different types of cells and tissues. How do cell layers align their behaviors to produce coherent organ growth? What signals act across tissues to coordinate development and differentiation, and how are they interpreted by cells precisely through space and over time? These are long-standing questions in developmental biology, from plants to lab animals and humans.
To address these questions, Nolan works with Arabidopsis thaliana, a crucial model organism for understanding plant biology. His lab develops new genetic tools for experiments with A. thaliana and uses the plant to answer open questions in developmental biology.
Nolan completed his undergraduate and doctoral work at Iowa State University and a postdoc at Duke University before joining the Caltech faculty in 2025.
Julia Tejada, assistant professor of geobiology and William H. Hurt Scholar
Julia Tejada is a paleobiologist who studies how the chemistry of organisms records their ecology and physiology, and how those signatures can be used to reconstruct the evolution of life through deep time. Her research combines stable isotope geochemistry, organismal biology, and paleontology to investigate how diet, digestive physiology, and metabolism shape the chemical composition of animal tissues. A major focus of the Tejada lab is expanding what stable isotopes can reveal about animal biology. Beyond their traditional use in reconstructing food webs, her lab investigates how amino acid isotope signatures, particularly threonine, record digestive physiology and dietary adaptations in living and extinct organisms.
Tejada also conducts paleontological fieldwork in the western Amazon, recovering fossil plants and vertebrates from understudied deposits. By integrating the fossil record with geochemical approaches, her lab investigates how organisms and ecosystems have changed through evolutionary time.
Tejada received her undergraduate degree from Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru, an MSc from the University of Florida, and an MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University. She completed postdoctoral appointments at the University of Montpellier and Cambridge University before joining the Caltech faculty in 2023.