Jing Fan, an assistant professor at the Grove School of Engineering at City College of New York, was named the recipient of this year’s National Science Foundation CAREER Award for her research project on cellular behavior.

The NSF CAREER Award is part of the Faculty Early Career Development Program that recognizes faculty members who have shown they serve as academic role models in research and education for their respective department or organization, according to the City College of New York.

Fan joins five other faculty members at City College to win this prestigious award and the financial grant that accompanies it. The other members to win this grant since 2018 include Dorthe M. Eisele, Ahmed Mohamed, Robert J. Messinger, Hao Su and Sriram Ganeshan.

Fan’s NSF award is totaled to be $546,626 for her research project: “Microfluidic development of dual-gel culture matrices for studying effects of interstitial flow on cellular behaviors.”

Her work is aimed at the development of “new tissue-mimetic, “dual gel” materials as cell culture matrices that allow for independent control of relevant biophysical and biochemical properties, such as matrix permeability, stiffness, confining pore size, and cell-binding site density,” according to the City College of New York.

Fan has also been recognized by several other notable organizations for research studies that she has conducted in the past, receiving numerous awards including the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Award, American Society of Mechanical Engineers Journal of Heat Transfer Outstanding Reviewer Award, the Li Ka Shing Prize and the Hong Kong Young Scientist Award, as stated on Fan’s personal website.

Fan joined City College back in January 2016 as an assistant professor for the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Previously, Fan was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University from 2012 to 2016. At Harvard, she researched microfluidics for materials production and the flow in porous media. Fan had completed her Ph.D. study at The University of Hong Kong in 2012. Her studies there primarily focused on the analysis of multiphase systems and computational fluid dynamics.

At CCNY, Fan currently leads a research lab that is primarily focused on complex fluids and soft materials.

Fan’s interests within her field include “the transport phenomena in biological tissues, design and fabrication of functional porous structures, enhanced oil recovery and flood conformance control, physics and applications of microfluidics, foam and emulsion physics, and development of functional particulate materials,” according to CCNY.

Other research studies that have captured her attention within her group include “the dispersed flow in porous media, structure and stabilization of foams and emulsions and developing functional micro materials,” according to CCNY’s website.