Dr. Roozbeh Tabrizian has been awarded the prestigious Director’s Fellowship from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Tabrizian, an assistant professor at the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and member of the Warren B. Nelms Institute, is the first University of Florida faculty member to receive the award. Director’s Fellowships are awarded to only a few exceptional performers among recent recipients of the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA).

Dr. Tabrizian was one of 31 recipients of the DARPA YFA in 2019, across all science and engineering fields and U.S. universities. The highly selective YFA program identifies faculty in junior research positions and provides funding, mentoring, and industry contacts to them early in their careers so they may develop their research ideas in the context of national security needs. The long-term goal of the YFA program is to develop the next generation of academic scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. The YFA award provided two years of funding for Dr. Tabrizian’s project: “Ferroelectrically Transduced Ge Nano-Fin Bulk Acoustic Resonators for Chip-Scale Instinctually Adaptive RF Spectral Processing.”

After the initial two-year period, a small number of YFA awardees who have demonstrated exceptional technical achievements and leadership are selected to receive the Director’s Fellowship, which provides an additional year of funding and support for their research project.

Dr. Tabrizian has received several other prestigious awards, including the 2021 HWCOE Pramod P. Khargonekar Award for the most outstanding junior faculty member undergoing tenure review, the ECE Professor of the Year Award in 2019, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2018, and the ECE Teaching Excellence Award in 2018.