Faculty

Researchers across the Cockrell School of Engineering were among the most frequently cited in their fields in 2021. A total of 11 Texas Engineers made the list of the top 1% most highly cited researchers in the world, as determined by the Institute for Scientific Information at London-based analytics firm Clarivate.

Alan Bovik, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been named the recipient of the 2022 Edison Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for "pioneering high-impact scientific and engineering contributions leading to the perceptually optimized global streaming and sharing of visual media.”

Five engineers and scientists from The University of Texas at Austin have been selected as fellows of the National Academy of Inventors, a prestigious distinction awarded to a select group of 164 academic innovators around the world for 2021. The new UT Austin fellows include four from the Cockrell School of Engineering and one from the College of Natural Sciences. They join 16 previous inductees from UT Austin.

Moriba Jah is many things: astrodynamicist, “space environmentalist,” professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, and core faculty member at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. Now he adds another title: chief scientific advisor for Privateer, a company led by Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak.

The American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) has recognized Nicholas Peppas with their 2021 Global Leader Award. The AAPS Global Leader Award recognizes a leader working in pharmaceutical science, technology, engineering, or education whose contributions to the field have resulted in outstanding positive impact on education and public health.

Nicholas Peppas has been elected president of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society, an international society for science and engineering. His three-year term began on July 1, 2021, and Peppas will help lead the organization’s continued focused on core goals of enhancing the health of the research enterprise, fostering integrity in science and engineering, and promoting the public's understanding of science.

Maša Prodanović, an associate professor in the Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, earned two prestigious industry awards this month — she was named a Distinguished Member from the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), and she was awarded the Alfred Wegener Award from the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE).

Sharon Wood does not start her day with coffee; she gave up caffeine during her undergraduate days. Instead, she starts by running or cycling. This will not surprise anyone who knows the hardworking, early rising engineer who, on July 19, becomes UT’s No. 2, the executive vice president and provost. “I drink cold water,” she says.

Brian Korgel, a professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering, will be the next director of the Energy Institute at The University of Texas at Austin, effective Sept. 1. Korgel succeeds Varun Rai, associate dean of research at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, who has served as the institute’s director since 2019. A nanomaterials scientist and member of the National Academy of Engineering, Korgel examines problems in energy storage, chemical transformations, energy harvesting and conversion, and medicine.

Roger Bonnecaze, an internationally recognized expert in rheology and nanomanufacturing modeling and simulation and a former chair of the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering, has been named interim dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

Sharon Wood has been appointed executive vice president and provost of The University of Texas at Austin and will start July 19. She is currently the dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT Austin. The provost is the chief academic officer and leads efforts to deliver world-class educational experiences and produce high-impact research and scholarship. This includes academic programs and initiatives that span the university’s 18 colleges and schools, which serve more than 51,000 students and support more than 3,000 teaching and research faculty members.

The Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin has named Donald Siegel, a professor at the University of Michigan and an internationally recognized computational materials scientist, as the next chair of UT’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering. He will assume his position on Sept. 1, 2021, succeeding the department’s current chair, Rick Neptune.

Professor Dave Allen of the Cockrell School’s McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering will receive a prestigious Eni Award, a top honor in the fields of energy and environmental research. Allen won the Energy Transition award, one of the three major Eni Awards. It recognizes innovative solutions for de-carbonizing the energy sector. The organization honored Allen for his work on limiting methane emissions from oil and gas activity.

Three researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering have earned the National Science Foundation's prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards — research associate Audrey Boklage, assistant professor Filippo Mangolini and assistant professor Manuel Rausch. The awards provide up to five years of funding to junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of their organizations’ missions.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are among the trendiest technologies in the world right now, and The University of Texas at Austin is rapidly becoming a leader in advancing these concepts as they come to impact more aspects of our daily lives. UT’s AI/ML chops leveled up even further this year when Zhangyang “Atlas” Wang joined the Cockrell School after three years as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. Wang’s research has garnered recognition from such luminaries in the field as Amazon and IBM.

The Western Society of Engineers will celebrate Engineers Week (Feb. 20-27) by honoring Nobel Laureate and Cockrell School of Engineering professor John B. Goodenough as the 103rd recipient of the Washington Award. The prestigious award is conferred upon an engineer whose professional accomplishments have preeminently advanced the welfare of humankind. Past recipients of the award include Henry Ford, Orville Wright and Neil Armstrong.

The National Academy of Engineering has elected S.V. Sreenivasan, professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, and three UT alumni as part of the Class of 2021. Sreenivasan is being recognized by the academy for his innovation and entrepreneurship in industrial deployment of nanoimprint lithography equipment, having pioneered the creation of nanoscale manufacturing systems that have enabled broad commercial deployment of nanoimprint lithography technology.

Along with the Precursors, who were the first Black undergraduate students to enroll at UT Austin in 1956, Ervin Perry — who, in 1964, became the first Black faculty member at UT, a professor of civil engineering — helped pave the way for continued desegregation across the university and showed the importance of having Black professors at UT. He was also one of a small handful of Black graduate students at his time of enrollment and the first Black engineering Ph.D. student at UT.

The National Academy of Television and Arts & Sciences has awarded Alan Bovik, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, and his team of student collaborators with a 2020 Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award. The team will be recognized for algorithms that optimize streaming media to millions of homes around the globe.

Delia Milliron has been a part of innovation from almost every angle. She has established herself as a leader in nanomaterials research, with an early-career resume that includes IBM and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Milliron, who joined The University of Texas at Austin in 2013, has co-founded two startups in her career with a common thread of nanomaterials and energy efficiency. She has authored or co-authored more than 145 journal articles, holds 19 patents and is the recipient of many awards, including the American Chemical Society’s Inorganic Nanoscience Award (2019), the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering (2018), the Norman Hackerman Award (2017) and the Sloan Research Fellowship (2016).