Faculty awards and honors

Gulsah Akar, assistant professor of city and regional planning, and Steve Gordon, professor emeritus of city and regional planning, were awarded a $151,000 Ohio Department of Transportation research grant for their project, “Linking Land Use, Transportation and Travel Behavior in Ohio: Incorporating Decline and Vehicle Choice Components.”

Dorota A. Grejner-Brzezinska, professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering, was named chair of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering.

Bharat Bhushan, Ohio Eminent Scholar and Howard D. Winbigler Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, was appointed a one-year Policy Fellow for the US Congress, serving on the House Committee on Science, Space & Technology, Subcommittee on Research and Technology.

Stuart L. Cooper, chair and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, received the 2013 Chemistry of Thermiplastic Elastomers Award from the American Chemical Society Rubber Division.

L.S. Fan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, received the 2013 AIChE R.H. Wilhem Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering for his sustained and lasting contributions to multiphase reaction engineering and for his pioneering work on ground-breaking clean energy technologies.

Samir Ghadiali, associate professor of biomedical engineering, received a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to create a library of computational models that will help clinicians diagnose and treat chronic ear infections. The five-year award is part of a Clinical Research Center Grant led by the University of Pittsburgh.

Amos Gilat, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, was elected Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Keith Gooch, associate professor of biomedical engineering, received a three-year $280,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop, validate, and utilize a computer model of cell-matrix interactions.

Thomas Hund, assistant professor, biomedical engineering, received a six-year grant of $450,000 from the James S. McDonnell Foundation for the project, "Synchronization of spontaneous activity in the cardiac pacemaker."

Dorothée Imbert, professor of landscape architecture, has been appointed head of the Landscape Architecture Section of the Knowlton School of Architecture. With her appointment, Imbert also becomes the School’s inaugural Hubert C. Schmidt '38 Chair in Landscape Architecture.

Walter Lempert and Igor Adamovich, professors of mechanical and aerospace engineering, are co-investigators in a $16 million Center for Exascale Simulation of Plasma-Coupled Combustion funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration. Led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the center will leverage extreme-scale computing to predict how plasmas could be used to control combustion.

Alan Luo, professor of materials science and engineering and integrated systems engineering, was elected Fellow of the ASM. Luo also recently received SAE International’s Forest R. McFarland Award.

Paula Mouser, assistant professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering, received a $209,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for research on how fracturing fluid concentrations decay naturally by native microorganisms.

Roberto Myers, principal investigator and professor of materials science and engineering, electrical and computer engineering and physics; Joseph Heremans, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology; and a multi-disciplinary team of researchers were awarded a five-year $6.25 million grant through the Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary Research Initiative (MURI) Program to explore materials with spin mediated thermal properties.

Giorgio Rizzoni, director of the Center for Automotive Research, was awarded a three-year $250,000 grant to develop a methodology to understand the propagation of aging in complex engineered systems consisting of many interconnected subsystems and components, and to demonstrate it by developing tools and methods to predict life and understand the state of health of battery pack systems in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

Rajendra Singh, professor of mechanical engineering, was named an Honorary Distinguished Professor within the Institute of Technology and Management (ITM) University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, located in Gurgaon, India.

Jeffrey Sutton, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, received $422,478 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to purchase instrumentation. He also received a $305,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for “Multi-scale Fluid Turbulence-Scalar Mixing Dynamics in Gas-Phase Turbulent Jets and a $100,000 NSF instrumentation award to procure components to develop and assemble an ultra-high-pulse-energy, ultraviolet to infrared wavelength tunable, narrow linewidth laser system.

John Volakis, professor of electrical and computer engineering, received the 2013 IEEE Rudolf Henning Distinguished Mentoring Award in recognition of his mentoring of students and young engineers to achieve successful careers in the areas of RF/microwave and wireless engineering.

David Williams, Monte Ahuja Endowed Dean’s Chair and dean of the College of Engineering, has been named Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3). He was also recently appointed to the Ohio Third Frontier Advisory Board by Governor John Kasich.

Jessica Winter, principal investigator and associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and biomedical engineering, Barbara Wyslouzil, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and chemistry; and Lisa Hall, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, received a four-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to improve manufacturing of nanoparticles for biomedical applications.

David Wood, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, received $500,000 to adapt his intein-based protein purification system into a proposed, laptop sized just-in-time therapeutics manufacturing device. The funding is part of a $7.9 million dollar contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), led by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).