Two UCLA Samueli School of Engineering assistant professors — Yuzhang Li and Bolei Zhou — have received Young Investigator Program awards from the Office of Naval Research to support their work on next-generation batteries and computer vision, respectively.

They join 22 other recipients in the 2025 award cohort chosen from more than 200 tenure-track or equivalent applicants at universities across the country. Awardees typically receive $750,000 in funding over three years.

Li, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, received his grant through the Office of Naval Research Electrochemical Materials Program to research smart, self-sensing batteries that can charge efficiently without degrading. He directs the Li Group at UCLA, which researches how electrochemical systems operate and fail, with the goal of improving renewable energy technology.

Li’s honors include an Army Research Office Young Investigator Award for work with next-generation magnesium- and aluminum-based batteries and a Department of Energy Early Career Research Award for investigating atomic-scale processes in lithium batteries with cryogenic-electron microscopy.

Zhou, an assistant professor of computer science, received his grant through the Office of Naval Research Machine Learning, Reasoning and Intelligence Program for his research into data-driven simulation and vision-language models. He is the principal investigator on three current NSF grants that utilize AI for transportation-related research, with applications in autonomous driving, household robots, digital animation and video games.

He directs the Zhou Lab at UCLA, which develops machine learning methods for computer vision and machine autonomy. Zhou also holds a faculty appointment in the computational medicine department, which is affiliated with the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and UCLA Samueli.

Read more about the awards on the UCLA Samueli website.