Ming Zhong Receives 2025 Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award

Award from Oak Ridge Associated Universities Provides $5,000 in Seed Funding

Ming Zhong, assistant professor of mathematics, received a 2025 Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities Council of Sponsoring Institutions. He is one of 37 recipients, out of 174 applications.

2025 Ralph E. Power Junior Faculty Enhancement Award Presentation
The 2025 Ralph E. Power Junior Faculty Enhancement Award presentation: From left, NSM Associate Dean for Research Randy Lee, UH Vice President for Research Claudia Neuhauser, Ming Zhong and NSM Dean Dan Wells.

Zhong is the only UH faculty to receive the award in 2025. He joined the UH faculty in fall 2024.

This competitive research award provides seed money for junior faculty members that often results in additional funding from other sources. The one-year, $5,000 award supports Zhong’s research on developing new mathematical models for explaining anti-social behaviors. UH will match the award with at least an additional $5,000.

“I am honored to have received such a prestigious award from ORAU. The funding will be used to develop new data-enabled methods to model social issues, such as crime monitoring and social injustice, with public data from the police departments in the cities of Chicago and Houston,” Zhong said.

The letter from Oak Ridge Associated Universities stated the award “represents public recognition by your academic peers of the quality and promise of your research.”

Overall, Zhong’s research focuses on making scientific discoveries from observation data. His research has two major directions, one is using machine learning to understand collective behaviors (such as clustering, flocking, swarming, and synchronization) from data, and the other is using scientific machine learning to build partial differential equation models from fluid mechanics, material sciences and social sciences.

Eligibility for the Powe Awards is open to full-time assistant professors at ORAU member institutions within two years of their tenure track appointment at the time of application. The research must fall i within one of these five disciplines:

  • Engineering and Applied Science
  • Life Sciences
  • Mathematics/Computer Sciences
  • Physical Sciences
  • Policy, Management, or Education

- Kathy Major, College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics