The CAREER program offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards supporting early-career faculty like Wharry, who have the potential to serve as academic leaders in research and education and to steer advances in their fields. Wharry is the first NSF CAREER recipient in the School of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University.

The five-year $560,000 award will support research on intergranular fracture, which is a specific failure mode common in structural materials throughout the automotive, aerospace, petrochemical, and nuclear industries. The goal is to explore the effectiveness of irradiation to alleviate fracture between grains and reduce the impact of materials' fracture across numerous industries.

 

Wharry’s research surrounds the micromechanical behavior of the materials under radiation. When examining the mechanical properties of a material (strength, ductility, and resistance to fracture) often times these items are quantified and talked about on a large-scale. These “bulk" or macroscale behaviors are actually governed by atomic/microscopic level features in the materials. Building the connection between the atomic and macro scales is exactly what Wharry and her team are trying to figure out – and with an emphasis on how radiation can change those relationships.