Projects
Research Projects
To respond to the needs of the Navy and the defense industry through innovative faculty research and a pipeline of highly trained workers, MUST research projects focus on subject areas that can both address short-term concerns and long-term goals.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Naval Research.
MUST I: Marine and UnderSea Technology (MUST) Research Program at UMass Dartmouth
FAIN #: N00014-20-1-2170
Award Period of Performance: 2/1/20-1/31/25
Total Award Budget: $4,576,764
Ramprasad Balasubramanian
Toward High-Power/High-Energy Flow Batteries for Applications in Unmanned Undersea Vehicles: Overcoming Fundamental Obstacles with a Bio-Inspired Active Material Scaffold
Patrick J. Cappillino, Maricris L. Mayes, and Louis G. Carreiro (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$165,431
Acoustic Radiation and Directional Patterns (ARDP) of Sensors and Sources
David A. Brown
Office of Naval Research
$366,436
Improving the Prediction Capability of Coastal Ocean Models using Hardware Acceleration
Geoffrey Cowles and Gaurav Khanna
Office of Naval Research
$147,848
Anti-biofouling Property and Lifetime of Super-Hydrophobic Surfaces in Marine Environment
Hangjian Ling, Pia Moisander, and Wei-Shun Chang
Office of Naval Research
$197,813
Advances in underwater marine technology: New solutions to biofouling
Pia Moisander, Wei-Shun Chang and Ranjan Mukherjee (Michigan State University)
Office of Naval Research
$399,666
Marine Sensing Technology for Acoustic Detection and Damage Monitoring through Embedded Composite Conductors
Vijaya Chalivendra, Arun Shukla (URI), and Helio Matos (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$419,367
Incremental Learning with Human-in-the-Loop for Underwater Anomaly Detection
Ming Shao and Paul Gendron
Office of Naval Research
$269,704
Bi-functional Polymer Matrix Composites for Structural Energy Storage in Marine Systems
Caiwei Shen
Office of Naval Research
$292,319
Intermediate and Long-Time Evolution of Turbulent Wakes in the Ocean
Miles A. Sundermeyer and Geoffrey W. Cowles
Office of Naval Research
$387,279
Deep Learning-Enabled Detection and Classification of Acoustic Signals in Underwater Channels
Ruolin Zhou, Paul Gendron, and Dayalan Kasilingam
Office of Naval Research
$476,926
Tethered Integrated RF/Photonic Transmit/Receive for Underwater Unmanned Communications
Yifei Li, Wei Guo (UMass Lowell), Tariq Manzur (NUWC), Robert Dougenik (NUWC), and Donald Steinbrecher (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$549,145
A multi-modal sensing enabled soft robotic end-effector for highly dexterous object manipulation in explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) missions
Kihan Park
Office of Naval Research
$400,230
Development of a Biomimetic Sensor with Augmented Sensitivity for Ocean Sensing Applications
Banafsheh Seyed-Aghazadeh and Hamed Samandari
Office of Naval Research
$475,715
MUST II: UMass Dartmouth Marine and Undersea Technology Research Program - Materials, Sensing and Communication for Naval Applications
FAIN #: N00014-20-1-2849
Award Period of Performance: 9/17/20-9/16/25
Total Award Budget: $4,205,268
Ramprasad Balasubramanian
Enhanced Source Localization Using Optimally Designed Metamaterials and Advanced Machine Learning for Underwater Applications
Arghavan Louhghalam, Mazdak Tootkaboni, Alireza Amirkhizi (UMass Lowell), Benjamin Cray (NUWC), and Ivars Kirsteins (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$370,177
Optimal Design and Additive Manufacturing of Functionally Graded Shell-Based PH Steel Metamaterials
Alireza Asadpoure, Mazdak Tootkaboni, Lorenzo Valdevit (UC Irvine), and Matthew Begley (UC Santa Barbara)
Office of Naval Research
$387,696
Second Generation Autonomy for Underwater Vehicles - Tracking Density Fronts and Turbulent Wakes as Test Cases for Advanced Autonomous Operations
Daniel MacDonald and Jim Reilly (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$423,732
Advanced Computational Investigation of Nose Curvature and Surface Hydrophobicity Effects in Water Entry of Solid Objects
Mehdi Raessi and Jess Belden (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$290,547
Computational Strategies for Scientific Data-Driven Learning for Marine and Undersea Technology Applications
Alfa Heryudono, Yanlai Chen, Sigal Gottlieb, Gaurav Khanna, Chris Hixenbaugh (NUWC), Makia Powell (NUWC), Eugene Chabot (NUWC), and Alec Yonika (Mikel, Inc.)
Office of Naval Research
$435,393
Regional Ocean Turbulence from Long-Duration, Autonomous Observations
Mark Altabet, Amit Tandon, and Geoff Cowles
Office of Naval Research
$1,043,876
Acoustic Rainfall Measurement on Global Drifters
Amit Tandon, John Buck, and Ian Sabo (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$1,253,847
MUST III: UMass Dartmouth Marine and Undersea Technology Research Program: Materials, Sensing and Communication for Naval Applications
FAIN #: N00014-22-1-2012
Award Period of Performance: 12/2/21-12/1/25
Total Award Budget: $4,328,191
Ramprasad Balasubramanian
Underwater Signal Processing for Remote Sensing and Communications
Paul Gendron
Office of Naval Research
$325,747
Durability and Performance of Flow Batteries for Applications in Marine and Undersea Technology
Patrick J. Cappillino, Maricris L. Mayes, Richard Urian (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$466,035
Multi Objective Reinforcement Learning for Automated Process Control of Modern Software Practices
Lance Fiondella
Office of Naval Research
$441,043
Organics Oxidation and Metals Precipitation from Naval Bilgewater Using Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC)
Sukalyan Sengupta, Caitlyn Butler (UMass Amherst), Sandeep Sathyamoorty (Black & Veatch)
Office of Naval Research
$305,189
Multiagent Learning in Complex Environment with Limited Communication
Yuchou Chang, Shelley Zhang (Adjunct Faculty), Eugene Chabot (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$250,535
Multi-Fidelity Information Fusion for Accelerated Predictive Modeling and Optimal Design of High Entropy Alloys
Mazdak Tootkaboni, Alireza Asadpoure, Yanlai Chen, Timothy Rupert (University of California), Lorenzo Valdevit (University of California), Negin Alem azkoor (University of Virginia)
Office of Naval Research
$477,181
Quantum Computing and Control in Noisy Environments
David Kagan, Renuka Rajapakse, Robert Fisher, Jay Wang
Office of Naval Research
$231,213
Detection, Characterization and Validation in Coastal Environments and of the Marine Wave Boundary Layer using Coordinated Airborne UAVs and Underwater AUVs
Miles Sundermeyer, Brian Howes, Robert Melvin (Teledyne Benthos)
Office of Naval Research
$495,095
Sub-Mesoscale and Mesoscale Interactions STudy (SubMIST)
Amit Tandon, Mark A. Altabet, Wendell Brown
Office of Naval Research
$1,336,152
MUST IV: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Marine and Undersea Technology Research Program
FAIN #: N00014-23-1–2141
Award Period of Performance: 1/1/23-12/31/25
Total Award Budget: $3,463,000
Ramprasad Balasubramanian
Active Optical Camouflage with Internal Communications
Wei-Shun Chang
Office of Naval Research
$358,432
Development of A Fully Coupled, Nonhydrostatic, Marine Infrastructure-resolving (up to ~ 1 m resolution), Atmospheric and Ocean Model System
Changsheng Chen
Office of Naval Research
$338,729
Applications of Machine Learning to Develop Statistical Emulators for Complex Spatial Marine Ecosystem Models for Improved Management Decision-making
Gavin Fay
Office of Naval Research
$376,392
Automated Vulnerability and Backdoor Detection as a Part of Software Development Pipeline
Gokhan Kul
Office of Naval Research
$286,754
Humpback Whale Behaviors in Relation to Human Activities and Structures on Stellwagon Bank
Kathryn Kavanagh
Office of Naval Research
$231,083
Learning Nonlinear Dynamical Systems from Sparse and Noisy Data: Applications to Signal Detection and Recovery
Scott Field, Zheng Chen, Alfa Heryudono, Vijay Varma, Brianna Johnson (NUWC), & Brendan Keith (Brown University)
Office of Naval Research
$438,284
Knowledge Augmented Adaptive Learning of Evolving Models for Large Sensor Data Streams
Donghui Yan, Haiping Xu & Steven Roodbeen (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$457,478
Development of a Remotely Deployable MADWEC Wave energy Conversion System for Utilization with a Sonobuoy Deployed Balloon Communication Package
Daniel MacDonald, Mehdi Raessi, Jose Vazquez & David Shane (Boston Engineering Corporation)
Office of Naval Research
$496,876
Cost-effective Elastic Filament Velocimetry (EFV) Sensor Network for Small Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs)
Kihan Park & Ian E. Owen (Jaia Robotics Inc)
Office of Naval Research
$478,972
MUST V: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Marine and Undersea Technology Program
FAIN #: N00014-24-1-2231
Award Period of Performance: 3/1/24-2/28/27
Total Award Budget: $4,290,264
Ramprasad Balasubramanian
Understanding the Mechanical Behavior of Calcareous Sands Through Bio-Morphological Shape Parameters
Ryan Beemer
Office of Naval Research
$409,439
Textured PiezoCeramics Materials Properties and Treatment
David Brown
Office of Naval Research
$303,903
Effect of Stress Fields and Arctic Conditions on Damage Sensing in Marine Composites
Vijaya Chalivendra
Office of Naval Research
$300,695
Advancing Autonomy of Resource-Constrained Unmanned Underwater Vehicles by Third-Generation Neural Network Models
Yuchou Chang, Christopher Hixenbaugh (NUWC) & Anton Spirkin (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$208,051
High-resolution (up to ~ 1-2 m resolution) Marine-infrastructure-resolving, Coupled Atmospheric and Ocean Model System Validation Experiments
Changsheng Chen
Office of Naval Research
$379,225
Cyber and Autonomous System Resilience Engineering
Lance Fiondella
Office of Naval Research
$442,095
Underwater Acoustic Communications at Extremely Low Signal to Noise Ratios
Paul Gendron
Office of Naval Research
$413,049
Microbially Influenced Corrosion of Materials in Marine Applications
Pia Moisander, Maricris Mayes & Micheline Labrie
Office of Naval Research
$347,399
AI-assisted and Quantum-Accelerated Computational Simulation of Multiphase Flow and Fluid-structure Interaction with Adaptive Mesh Refinement: Application in Water Entry of Solid Object
Mehdi Raessi, David Markt (NUWC) & Jesse Belden (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$437,123
Optimizing the Design of a Novel Upper Ocean Variable Buoyancy Vehicle (Aurelia)
Amit Tandon, Ruolin Zhou, Lauren Freeman (NUWC) & Oliver Sun (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$486,493
Wide Dynamic Range Photonic Frontend Receiver for Ultrawideband Electronic Sensor
Yifei Li & John Murphy (SeaCorp, LLC)
Office of Naval Research
$562,792
MUST VI: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Marine and Undersea Technology Program
FAIN #: N00014-25-1-2315
Award Period of Performance: 5/1/25 - 4/30/28
Total Award Budget: $4,280,001
Ramprasad Balasubramanian
3-D Electrospun Porous Superhydrophobic Anti-Biofouling Scaffolds
Sankha Bhowmick, Hangjian Ling, Pia Moisander
Office of Naval Research
$434,710
Machine Learning-Driven Signal Reconstruction and Anomaly Detection for Advanced Monitoring Systems
Sarah Caudill
Office of Naval Research
$418,991
Underwater Microplastic Detection and Characterization by Developing a Polarization-based Lenless System
Ana Doblas
Office of Naval Research
$425,691
AUVchat: A Large Language Model-driven Open-source Tool to Enable Adaptive and Transferable AUV Path Planning Reinforcement Learning
Long Jaio
Office of Naval Research
$260,983
Fully Understand Turbulent Flows over Large-Scale Superhydrophobic Surface by Advanced Micro/Nano-Fabrications and High-Resolution Flow Measurement
Hangjian Ling, Edwin Lopez Ramos (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$276,237
Microbially Influenced Corrosion of Materials in Marine Applications
Pia Moisander, Micheline Labrie, Maricris Mayes, Tom Ramotowski (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$279,262
Nonlinear Optics for Quantum Cybersecurity
Renuka Rajapakse, David Kagan, & Jianyi Wang
Office of Naval Research
$211,902
Advancing Ocean Model Technology for Convergent Solutions in Coupling Boundary Layers and Internal Waves over the Continental Slope
Siqi Li & Changsheng Chen
Office of Naval Research
$398,695
Experimental & Numerical Investigation of Composite Hose used for Undersea Navy Applications
Vijaya Chalivendra, Valentina Rossell Olmos (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$491,957
Whisker Wonders: Scaling Secrets, Natural Geometry, and Machine Learning Insights into Harbor Seal Whiskers as Biological Hydrodynamic Sensors
Banafsheh Seyedaghazadeh, Ruolin Zhou, Hamed Samandari, Christin Murphy (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$595,793
Machine Learning-based Design of High-entropy Polymer Electrolytes for Multifunctional Energy Storage Applications
Caiwei Shen, Maricris Mayes, Ming Shao, Irine Chenwi (NUWC)
Office of Naval Research
$485,780