Congratulations to Dr. Meng for receiving the New Innovator Award from the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR)! The total award amount is $450,000. The New Innovator Award seeks to support and promote career advancement of highly creative and promising new faculty who are conducting critical and innovative research and are establishing research programs that bring ground-breaking research initiatives and thinking to bear on problems facing food and agriculture. Within the scope of the New Innovator Program, investigators will have the freedom to explore new avenues of inquiry that arise during their research, have the ability to pursue highly creative ideas, firmly establish their early lines of research into important food and agriculture scientific areas, and provide stability in funding during their critical early career years.
Each year, US institutions of higher education, US nonprofit institutions, and the US Department of Agriculture may submit one nominee to the FFAR New Innovator Award program. There are no more than ten awards each year. Zhaoxu won the only nomination from Clemson University through internal competition and eventually won this award. Zhaoxu’s proposed project aims to revolutionize the design and fabrication of biopolymer nanocomposites for sustainable food packaging through innovative computational modeling, resource diversification for various carbohydrate biopolymers, nanotechnological fabrication, and AI-driven knowledge extraction and design optimization.
