Faculty Awards

Most Recent Awards

Professor Kamil Ekinci was selected as the 2010 Distinguished Faculty Fellow at College of Engineering, an award that recognizes midlevel faculty members for significant contributions to their field. Ekinci will receive $20,000 per year for the next five years to support his investigations of mechanical systems at nanometer length scales.Through measurements of the physical properties of nanomechanical systems, Ekinci hopes to gain a better understanding of the fundamental physical processes in nanomechanical systems, and to design and fabricate ultra-high speed nanomechanical sensors.

Professor J. Gregory McDaniel is the recipient of the 2010 Metcalf Cup and Prize, Boston University’s highest teaching honor. The Metcalf Cup and Prize and the Metcalf Awards were created in 1973 with a gift from the late Arthur G. B. Metcalf (SED’35, Hon.’74), a former faculty member and longtime chairman of the Board of Trustees. The Cup winner receives $10,000. A committee chooses the winners based on nominees’ statements of teaching philosophy, letters of support from colleagues and students, and committee members’ in-class observations of the teachers.

McDaniel earned an undergraduate degree at the University of Florida and a master’s and Ph.D. at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has taught at BU since 1993.

Professor Katherine Yanhang Zhang is the ME Department’s newest recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER Award. The research objective of her Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) research is to create a novel experimental methodology to investigate the local elastic and viscoelastic properties and forces within extracellular matrix (ECM) with well-defined global mechanical properties and under controlled tissue-level mechanical loading; and quantitatively assess the impact of tissue-level mechanical loading on the regulation of local cell contraction forces and ECM microenvironment. ECM provides the principal avenue for mechanochemical communication between tissue and cells. These signals play critical roles in establishing tissue structure-function relationships and controlling cell fate. To date, little is known about how mechanical forces are translated within the ECM from tissue to cellular level. Such kind of information is critical for the future expansion of the knowledge of cellular mechanotransduction within the context of living tissues and organisms.

The highly interdisciplinary and integrative nature of this research will facilitate advances in a wide variety of fields. Results from the proposed research will allow us to better understand the mechanisms by which ECM mechanics influence cell and tissue behavior, and the onset of pathology in a number of tissues in which altered mechanics play important roles. The education plan of this CAREER proposal will incorporate several outreach activities that reflect the need of early intervention and mentorship on increasing the participation of women and minorities in science and engineering to existing outreach programs at Boston University. The multi-disciplinary and multi-level education plan will establish an attractive and collaborative learning environment for students from all levels, help students acquire knowledge from different fields, and facilitate students’ communication skills across disciplines.

Faculty Awards

SEAN ANDERSSON

• 2009 NSF CAREER Award
• Associate Editor, Conference Editorial Board, IEEE Control Systems Society and Robotics and Automation Society

JOHN BAILLIEUL

• 2009 Inaugural Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, SIAM
• 2008 Inaugural Distinguished Lecturer Series Award, College of Engineering, Boston University
• 2000 IEEE Third Millenium Medal
• 1992 Fellow of the IEEE