The CAREER Award is NSF’s most prestigious honor for early-career faculty, recognizing researchers who demonstrate the potential to become leaders in both research and education.

Mahajan received the award for her research on designing energy-efficient, adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) datacenters through a cyber-physical approach that jointly considers AI software, computing hardware, and the physical state of the underlying infrastructure.

As AI models continue to grow in scale and complexity, they place increasing demands on every layer of datacenter infrastructure—from accelerators, memory, and networking to power delivery, cooling, and security. Yet these systems are often designed and optimized one layer at a time, limiting overall efficiency and adaptability.

Mahajan’s research reimagines AI datacenters as cyber-physical systems in which software, hardware, and physical operating conditions continuously inform one another.

“AI infrastructure should be designed around the real-time condition of the hardware, not just its specifications,” Mahajan said. “By making AI systems aware of the physical state of the infrastructure, we can build datacenters that are more efficient, adaptive, and resilient at scale.”

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