University honors distinguished engineering faculty, alumni

Posted: 

Three College of Engineering faculty and one alumnus were honored with distinguished teaching, scholarship and service awards from The Ohio State University.


Professors Martin Feinberg (left) and Rob Siston received Ohio State’s 2014 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching
Professors Martin Feinberg (left) and Rob Siston received Ohio State’s 2014 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching
Martin Feinberg, the Richard M. Morrow Chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering, received a 2014 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. He is considered a world leader in the application of mathematics to chemical engineering problems, particularly understanding how complex chemical reaction networks behave. Feinberg’s pioneering Chemical Reaction Network Toolbox, a powerful software tool for the study of chemical reaction networks, has been downloaded more than 10,000 times, making a major impact on hundreds of students and countless chemical engineers. He is also credited with adding a much-needed coherent conceptual framework to many chemical and biomolecular engineering courses, which students have praised as giving courses much greater clarity. 

Bill Lowrie
Bill Lowrie
Alumnus Bill Lowrie has been selected to receive the 2014 University Distinguished Service Award, which recognizes exceptional and truly distinguished service to the university. After graduating from Ohio State with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1966, he joined AMCO and worked his way through the ranks, ultimately becoming deputy CEO. Throughout his demanding career, Lowrie has remained a dedicated supporter of his alma mater, particularly the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering which carries his name. Since the early ’80s, he has provided leadership on a variety of Ohio State committees as well as significant financial contributions. In 2009, he made a transformative financial commitment to support the construction of the Koffolt Laboratories in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Chemistry Building (opening in 2014), the creation of a professorship and an endowed chair, and enhancement of education and research initiatives. 

Rob Siston, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, received a 2014 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. He is known as an effective and enthusiastic teacher who goes above and beyond to help his students succeed. Praised for his innovative, adaptive teaching style and use of technology to best connect with students, Siston was instrumental in flipping the ME 3671 machine elements course by putting lecture content online and using class time to answer questions and work on examples. He is also recognized for being an effective coordinator and advisor for the mechanical and aerospace engineering honors program, all while establishing a successful research program. Siston created an experiential interdisciplinary capstone sequence that gives students from multiple disciplines the opportunity to create a novel device, pursue opportunities to commercialize it, and then ultimately see how their invention influences the lives of persons with disabilities. 

DeLiang Wang
DeLiang Wang
DeLiang Wang, professor of computer science and engineering, was recognized for exceptional achievement in his field with a 2014 Distinguished Scholar Award. One of the most prominent researchers in the field of speech and hearing technology, he is known for revolutionary contributions to oscillatory correlation theory and solving the speech segregation problem. Wang’s analysis of neural oscillator networks and his more recent endeavor in segregating the target speech from its acoustic inference is one of his best known works. Algorithms developed by Wang and his research team on pitch tracking, dereverberation, singing voice separation, mask estimation and localization-based separation are widely used in the research community and have generated state-of-the-art performance. He currently leads a multimillion dollar National Institutes of Health effort to help listeners with hearing loss better understand speech in noise