Two Women Scholars Win Waterman Awards From the National Science Foundation

The U.S. National Science Foundation has named its awardees for this year’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the nation’s highest honor for early-career scientists and engineers. The winners receive $1 million in funding over five years to support their research. Two of the three winners this year are women.

Jessica E. Tierney is an associate professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on understanding past climate change, with the goal of improving the understanding of what the future holds. She specializes in generating organic geochemical records of paleoclimate, derived from fossil molecules known as biomarkers that are preserved in sediments and rocks.

“Studying the past is important because it can narrow our projections for what climate will look like at the end of the century and what sort of impacts humans will face,” Dr. Tierney said.

Dr. Tierney joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in 2015. She holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in geology, all from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Lara Thompson is a biomedical engineer who is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of the District of Columbia. Dr. Thompson is recognized for her innovations in rehabilitation engineering and for translating her research on vestibular disorders in primates into engineering-based interventions for individuals with balance, gait, and postural impairments.

“With this award, I can take my research a step further and explore various ideas and perhaps look into rehabilitation robotics and devices for veterans and amputees, which is another group that I am really interested in,” said Dr. Thompson.

Dr. Thompson is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she majored in mechanical engineering. She holds a master’s degree in aeronautical and astronomical engineering from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.