Awards and Recognition

Qi Li, associate professor, was part of a team that received an Einhorn Center Engaged Opportunity Grant to upgrade the Coddington Road Community Center for all-season youth programming.

David Goldberg, associate professor, has been selected to receive a 2025 Community-Engaged Practice and Innovation Award from the David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement. Goldberg’s commitment and ability to integrate community engagement into his courses, leadership, or research programs stood out to the selection committee. The awards will be conferred at a dinner event on Tuesday, April 8.

Tobias Hanrath has been elected the Croll Professor of Sustainable Energy Systems for a four-year term, effective September 15, 2024.

Master’s in AI has ranked the R.F. Smith School’s M.Eng. in Chemical Engineering with a focus on Data Science and Artificial Intelligence as the #1 Best On-Campus Master’s in Data Science for AI or Machine Learning.

Alexandra Coso Strong, associate professor, has been awarded the 2025 Women in Engineering ProActive Network Leader in Engineering Education Award for creating new methods or approaches to enhance engineering education. WEPAN Awards honor key individuals, programs, and organizations for accomplishments that underscore WEPAN’s mission to advance cultures of inclusion and diversity in engineering education and professions.Coso Strong was recognized on February 9 at the Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity Conference Awards Ceremony in San Antonio, TX.

Peter McMahon, associate professor, was selected as the 2025 recipient of Optica’s Adolph Lomb Medal. He was honored for demonstrating new forms of optical-physics-based computing machines that might one day surpass the standard digital-electronic von Neumann computers.

“I’m very grateful to have been recognized with this award,” said McMahon. “The Lomb Medal has an amazing list of past recipients, many whose research has inspired me since graduate school. Although this award names me, it really recognizes the work my lab has done collaboratively, and which has been led by the wonderful postdocs and students I have had as colleagues in my group. I am most indebted to them.”

The Adolph Lomb Medal is presented annually to an individual who has made a noteworthy contribution to optics at an early career stage. Contributions from any area of optics, fundamental or applied, are considered. The medal was established in 1940 to honor Adolph Lomb, the Society’s first treasurer, for his devotion to the Society and the advancement of optics. In 2023, Will Renninger (B.S.’06 in engineering physics and Ph.D. ’12 in applied physics working with Professor Frank Wise) also won this medal. Renninger’s award was “For pioneering contributions to opto-mechanics, ultrashort pulse generation, novel fiber lasers, and multimode nonlinear optics.”

McMahon’s other awards include the IUPAP Early Career Scientist Prize for Applied Aspects on Laser Physics and Photonics (2022), an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award (2022), a Sloan Research Award (2022),  a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2021), a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholarship in Quantum Information Science (2020), and a Google Quantum Research Award (2019).

Bruce R. Kusse, professor emeritus, and Frank Wise, Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering Emeritus, were approved for emeritus status effective January 1, 2025.

Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor of Energy Systems Engineering, has received the International Association of Engineers Distinguished Scientist Award for Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Engineering. You will receive his award at the IAENG Summit 2025 February 20 in New York City.

The Fengqi You Research Group received a U.S. National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) Award for its proposal, AI for Sustainability Sciences and Engineering. AISSE will integrate advanced AI tools with sustainability research across the campus to address grave environmental challenges.  

Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor of Energy Systems Engineering, had his study “Perspectives for sustainability analysis of scalable perovskite photovoltaics” featured on the cover of the Energy & Environmental Science.