Sandia scientists Mitchell Wood (left) and Gianluca Geraci (right) received 2024 DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program awards. Each will receive $2.75 million over five years to support their research in Fusion Energy Sciences and Advanced Scientific Computing Research. They were selected from a competitive pool of applicants, with 91 awardees chosen through peer review by scientific experts.
Mitch Wood, a computer scientist in Sandia’s computational multiscale department, received a DOE Early Career Research Award for his research on materials science and machine learning. His work spans plasma-facing materials, multiscale modeling of shock compression, and physics-inspired machine learning. With the award funding, Wood plans to study how materials withstand radiation damage and develop new methods for designing fusion power plants. His project, titled “Mechanisms of Non-Equilibrium Ion Dynamics in Radiation Tolerant Alloys,” is focused on using new data-science methods to capture physical processes that have been historically computationally expensive.
Gianluca Geraci, a computational scientist in Sandia’s optimization and uncertainty quantification department, received the DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Award for his work in scientific machine learning for predictive computational science. His research focuses on uncertainty quantification, multifidelity methods, data-driven approaches, and related fields. Geraci’s awarded project, “Enabling Scientific Data-Driven Modeling for Heterogeneous, Multi-Model, Massive, and Distributed Datasets,” aims to develop mathematical and algorithmic tools for scientific machine learning to advance DOE applications. This award will support his research for the next five years, allowing him to build a team and contribute to the scientific mission of the DOE and Sandia.
August 13, 2025