Awards

Four faculty members from the Cockrell School of Engineering have earned the National Science Foundation's prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards. The CAREER award provides up to five years of funding to junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through cutting-edge research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of their organizations’ missions.

Brian Belardi has been awarded the prestigious David and Lucile Packard Foundation Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, a high honor that recognizes the nation’s top young scientists and engineers and spurs them to take on risky, impactful projects.

Todd Humphreys, a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, is the recipient of the 2023 Johannes Kepler Award from the Institute of Navigation.

Guihua Yu was one of 28 U.S. researchers under the age of 42 to be named as finalist honorees for the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, announced by New York Academy of Sciences.

The newly formed UT Austin-Amazon Science Hub has awarded its first round of research gifts and fellowships to scientists and engineers across three schools and colleges at the Forty Acres.

Al Bovik, professor in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has been elected to the Academia Europaea for 2023 for his contributions to video engineering. The object of Academia Europaea is the advancement and propagation of excellence in scholarship in the humanities, law, the economic, social, and political sciences, mathematics, medicine, and all branches of natural and technological sciences anywhere in the world for the public benefit and for the advancement of the education of the public of all ages. The aim of the Academy is to promote European research, advise governments and international organizations in scientific matters, and further interdisciplinary and international research.

Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering assistant professor Wen Song received the 2023 Arie van Weelden Award from the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE) in June. Given annually, the award recognizes a young professional who has made a highly significant contribution to one or more of the association’s disciplines.

An international research team co-led by Texas Engineer Guihua Yu won the Royal Society of Chemistry’s (RSC) prestigious Materials Chemistry Horizon Prize, an award celebrating groundbreaking developments which push the boundaries of science. 

2023 Cockrell School of Engineering graduates Hannah Lee and Aditi Merchant are recipients of this year’s Knight-Hennessy Scholarship. Among the most prestigious student awards in higher education, the Knight-Hennessy Scholarship funds graduate studies at Stanford University and provides leadership training, workshops, projects and travel opportunities for its recipients.

Two University of Texas at Austin students have been named recipients of Goldwater scholarships, the preeminent award for undergraduate students who conduct research in the natural sciences, mathematics or engineering.

Deji Akinwande, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has been named a 2023 Fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS Fellow) for “contributions to the development of wafer-scale monolayer graphene, and the realization of flexible nanosystems.”

The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) awarded Nicholas Peppas the Professional Impact Award for Mentoring during its annual meeting.

Bob Metcalfe, professor emeritus in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, was named the recipient of the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award for the invention, standardization and commercialization of Ethernet.

Space debris expert and Texas Engineer Moriba Jah has earned the rare honor of being elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), Scotland’s National Academy. RSE elected 91 total fellows for 2023, but only six from outside the United Kingdom.

Many faculty awards come as happy surprises, seemingly out of the blue. Such is not the case for the prestigious Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, for which one must apply. A campus-wide awards committee reviews the entries and makes its recommendation, which, in the case of the Regents award, bestowed by The University of Texas System, normally becomes the winner.

Four faculty members at The University of Texas at Austin have been named to the National Academy of Inventors’ 2023 class of Senior Members. The honorees include three faculty members from the Cockrell School of Engineering and one from the College of Natural Sciences.

They are Jennifer Maynard, Jason McLellan, Delia Milliron and Sriram Vishwanath.

The National Academy of Engineering has elected Benny Freeman, a professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, to the academy for 2023. Alumnus Fariborz Maseeh, who received a master’s degree in civil engineering from UT Austin, has also been elected.

A pair of Texas Engineers have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society.

Radu Marculescu, professor in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has been named a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) for 2022 for "contributions to low-power and communication-based design of embedded systems." 

Ervin S. Perry and T.U. Taylor were inducted into the Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Academy of Distinguished Alumni, becoming the first posthumous inductees in the academy's history.