Awards and Honors 2025

• Alison Dollaway, Karen Prosser, James Tanaka, Thom Quinn, Tobias Hanrath, Matthew Paszek, and Qiuming Yu

  EPICC Award for Collaboration. This award was given in recognition of their tireless work to enhance and transform the school’s safety standards, practices and culture. This award encourages and rewards teamwork in the conviction that solving grand challenges requires a range of perspectives and a collective effort greater than the sum of its parts.

• Kate Nowlan

  Administrative assistant

  William C. Hooey Outstanding Staff Award. The award was established in 2011 by the school to recognize a member of the staff for consistently going above and beyond their job responsibilities. Nowlan offers critical support to faculty, including revamping the school’s awards process and supporting research teams. Her work to streamline a process to prepare nominations for faculty awards has made an impactful difference in enabling the school to honor faculty for the fantastic work they do, and helped raise the visibility of the work that goes on in the school.

• Jessica Boynton

  Finance specialist

  Nominated, Employee Assembly Award for Staff Integrity and Inclusion in recognition of her strong leadership, integrity and commitment to fostering an inclusive workplace. Shortly after joining the school, she stepped up to lead the its annual facilities space inventory. This demanding project required her to train new employees while mastering and applying complex systems with ease.

Farewell to

• Karen Prosser

  The department bids farewell to Karen Prosser, director of administration, as she takes on a new role in the college as associate director of budget and finance. Prosser has been an integral part of our team, and the school is grateful for her many contributions.

Hooey Awards highlight research in protein delivery, antibody glycoengineering

• Fall 2024 – Azmain Alamgir

  Alamgir is a Ph.D. candidate co-advised by Christopher Alabi and Matthew DeLisa. His research focuses on addressing the long-standing challenge of transporting protein-based therapeutics across cell membranes. His work aims to create a versatile protein-delivery platform using lipid nanoparticle formulations that ‘cloak’ proteins so they can be delivered effectively, both in vitro and in vivo, for multiple therapeutic uses. He will also investigate the platform’s use in delivering antibodies to block disease pathways.

  Alamgir grew up in Madison, Mississippi. He earned a B.S. in chemical engineering from Northwestern University, where he developed a love of research from working in the lab of Milan Mrksich. Since coming to Cornell in 2019, Alamgir has been an actively involved with ChEGSA and CBE Women as well as with the broader Cornell community through his participation in outreach events like Engineering Your Horizons and 4-H to increase youth engagement—particularly from underrepresented minority communities—with STEM-related fields.

   

• Spring 2025 –  Belén Sotomayor

  Belén Sotomayor, originally from Ecuador, earned her B.Sc. in chemical engineering at Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja, where she researched eco-friendly methods for cyanide biodegradation and gold recovery—work that won her the National Undergraduate Research Award. She joined Cornell in 2020 as a Ph.D. student in synthetic glycobiology, where she developed the first bacterial platform to produce glycosylated full-length immunoglobulin-G antibodies.

  Sotomayor has been recognized for both scientific excellence and leadership. She is a Bouchet Graduate Honor Society inductee, a Fleming Scholar and recipient of Ecuador’s prestigious Matilde Hidalgo Medal. In 2022, she was named one of 100 global “Leaders of Tomorrow” by the non-profit Global Biotech Revolution and won the Global Biotech Entrepreneurial Competition at the University of Cambridge.

  A  passionate advocate for women in STEM and accessible education, she has held leadership roles in multiple organizations. As president of CBE Women, she led the group to receive the Cornell Engineering Alumni Association Student Organization Leadership Award.