Faculty

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. 

Matthew T. Balhoff will be the next chair of the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (PGE).

Balhoff, an expert in pore-scale modeling, reservoir simulation and microfluidics, is the Bank of America Centennial Professor in Petroleum Engineering and co-leads leads the Industrial Affiliate Program on Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery.

How light interacts with matter is one of the most basic, yet important branches of science. A growing area in this field is nanophotonics, which studies these interactions at the smallest of scales where material building blocks begin to exhibit dynamic properties.

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." 

Texas Engineers Karen Willcox and Moriba Jah have been named to the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, one of the most influential Federal Advisory Committees in science and technology.

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. 

Arumugam Manthiram will be the inaugural recipient of an award from the Electrochemistry Society named for his long-time colleague and collaborator John Goodenough.

The Goodenough award was first announced at a 100th birthday celebration for the battery luminary at The University of Texas at Austin earlier this year. It celebrates distinguished contributions to the fundamental and technological aspects of electrochemical materials science and engineering.

Moriba Jah, an astrodynamicist, space environmentalist and aerospace engineer at The University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the “genius grant.” The award recognizes Jah’s work to track and monitor the more than 30,000 human-made objects orbiting the earth.

Hundreds of students, faculty and staff members, alumni and friends gathered to celebrate a transformative gift resulting in the naming of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. The department will now be named the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Ramesh Yerraballi, a professor of instruction in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has been named a recipient of the 2022 University of Texas System Board of Regents Outstanding Teaching Award. The award is the Board of Regents’ highest honor and recognizes faculty members who have demonstrated extraordinary classroom performance and innovation in undergraduate instruction.

Nine faculty members from across the Cockrell School of Engineering have earned the National Science Foundation's prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards. 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.