Professor Yifeng Yu has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award. This is one of the most prestigious awards available to a junior faculty member. Recipients are "junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research."

Professor Yu works on both nonlinear partial differential equations theory and its applications in science and engineering, such as optimal control and combustion. For example, how to predict the turbulent flame speed and, in particular, to understand how it depends on the turbulence intensity, will be studied in this project. A very important part of the CAREER Award is its educational component. Besides supervision of graduate students, the Professor Yu also plans to participate in several well-established educational programs at UC-Irvine, such as the California MathCounts, the Irvine Area Math Modelers (IAMM), the SURF program, and the Freshman Seminar Program. The project will use mathematics to help combustion science and engineering, with implications for clean energy, as well as further the education of the next generation of STEM scientists.

Professor Yu earned his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2005, and served in postdoctoral positions at the University of Texas, Austin and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. He joined UCI as an Assistant Professor in July 2008.