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Goodnight Early Career Innovators Award

The Goodnight Early Career Innovators Award supports early career faculty excellence and promotes retention of tenure-track assistant professors whose scholarship is in STEM or STEM education.

Recognizing Early Career Excellence

The Provost’s Office oversees the Goodnight Early Career Innovators Award program. The program recognizes and rewards tenure-track assistant professors who demonstrated early productivity in STEM or STEM education research and innovation.

Approximately 25 awards are made annually. Faculty members selected as Goodnight Early Career Innovators received $22,000 annually for three years to support their scholarship and research endeavors.

NC State Announces 2024-25 Goodnight Early Career Innovators


This program recognizes and rewards promising NC State early-career faculty whose scholarship is in STEM or STEM education. The 25 faculty selected will receive $22,000 ­for each of the next three years to support their scholarship and research endeavors.

Afternoon sunlight streams through the fall foliage at Wolf Plaza. Photo by Becky Kirkland.

Selected Innovators

Since the Goodnight Early Career Innovators Award program began in 2021, 99 faculty have received this honor. Here’s the most recent class of innovators.

  • Katherine Anarde, assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering
  • Michael Bradshaw, assistant professor of entomology and plant pathology
  • Sunghwan Byun, assistant professor of STEM Education
  • Nathan Crook, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering
  • Catherine Davis, assistant professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences
  • Basheerah Enahora, assistant professor of agricultural and human sciences
  • Joseph Gage, assistant professor of crop and soil sciences
  • Jessica Gluck, assistant professor of textile engineering, chemistry and science
  • Lucie Guertault, assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering
  • Christophe Guilluy, assistant professor of molecular biomedical sciences
  • Emily Hector, assistant professor of statistics
  • Jordan Kern, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering
  • Sebastian König, assistant professor of physics
  • Ravi Kulkarni, assistant professor of population health and pathobiology
  • Xiaojing Liu,  assistant professor of molecular and structural biochemistry
  • Samantha Marshall, assistant professor of teacher education and learning sciences
  • Erin McKenney, assistant professor of applied ecology
  • Jun Ohata, assistant professor of chemistry
  • Kelly Oten, assistant professor of forestry and environmental resources
  • Kasie Raymann, assistant professor of plant and microbial biology
  • Sara Shashaani, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering
  • Sara Villani, assistant professor of entomology and plant pathology
  • Justin Whitehill, assistant professor of forestry and environmental resources
  • Lirong Xiang, assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering
  • Rong Yin, assistant professor of textile engineering, chemistry and science