Aditya Kumar, an assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech, received a $638,740 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, one of the NSF’s most prestigious honors for early-career faculty. The five-year award will support Kumar’s research into how composite materials fracture and fail based on their microscopic structure. His project seeks to develop mathematical and computational models to predict how the composition and internal arrangement of materials determine their strength and resistance to fracture. Kumar’s work focuses on soft composites, including natural rubber. By developing computational methods to predict material performance, the research could help create stronger, more reliable materials for infrastructure, aerospace, energy, and transportation.