Rare Double Honor

Assistant Professor Meng Han Secures Prestigious DOE and NSF Early Career Awards
Meng Han

The department is celebrating an extraordinary achievement as Assistant Professor Meng Han joins an elite group of young scientists nationwide who have secured both the Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Research Award and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award.

Winning either award is considered a pinnacle achievement for junior faculty; securing both simultaneously marks Dr. Han as one of the most promising young researchers in the field of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) Physics. This rare "double crown" of federal funding provides over $1.3 million in total support for his pioneering work in attosecond science.

Dr. Han, who joined the department in 2023, is being recognized for his transformative research into the fastest measurable events in nature.

  • The DOE Early Career Award ($875,000): This five-year grant supports his project, “Probing and Controlling Attosecond Chirality in Molecules by Multi-Dimensional Coincidence Spectroscopy.” The research aims to understand and manipulate the "handedness" (chirality) of molecules at the speed of electron motion.
  • The NSF CAREER Award ($500,000): This prestigious grant funds his project, “Table-Top Attosecond-Pump Attosecond-Probe Spectroscopy,” which focuses on developing compact, laboratory-scale technology to observe sub-atomic dynamics that previously required massive facility-scale equipment.


“Meng is an amazingly productive scientist,” noted department head Tim Bolton. “He has put together a world leading attoscience lab in a remarkable short period of time. Securing both an NSF CAREER and a DOE Early Career award is a testament to the impact and caliber of his research.”

Dr. Han’s work is already making waves in the scientific community; in 2025, his research on acoustic waves published in OPTICA was selected as a research highlight by Nature editor Nina Meinzer. With this new surge of federal and departmental support, Dr. Han is raising the K-State Physics James R. Macdonald Laboratory position to even higher heights as a global leader in ultrafast laser technology and AMO physics.