College of Engineering Dean’s Fellows Program Rewards the Best Entering Doctoral Students

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The College of Engineering is recognizing its 26 most accomplished, first-year doctoral students with the distinction of Dean’s Fellows for 2018-19, a program which rewards entering Ph.D. students with financial support, academic acknowledgement and career-making research opportunities.

Associate Dean Russell Tessier says, “The fellowships are jointly sponsored by the Graduate School and the College of Engineering. Each fellow receives full financial support for the first two semesters of study, including one semester of fellowship support and one semester of teaching or research assistantship.”

Tessier adds, “Fellows are identified as having great potential for doctoral research during the Ph.D. application process.”

Since enrolling in September 2018, the Dean’s Fellows have demonstrated a record of achievement in an array of fields.

For example, in the chemical engineering department, they are studying issue such as functional biomaterials for therapeutic or diagnostic applications, drug design and delivery, zeolite synthesis and its application in catalysis.  

In civil and environmental engineering, one new fellow worked for five years in the Indian National Institute of Ocean Technology to help bring offshore wind energy to that country.Others research artificial intelligence in transportation asset management and water supplies in Mexico City.

In electrical and computer engineering, they are looking at hardware security and embedded systems and energy access in sustainable rural development for the developing world. One new fellow applies deep learning and computer vision techniques to satellite imagery for monitoring infrastructure systems in developing countries.

In mechanical and industrial engineering, they are scrutinizing the behavior of the typical aneurysmal wall in blood flow, working on floating wind turbines and airborne wind-energy devices and developing non-intrusive implantable devices used for bio-signal sensing and reacting with soft bio-friendly materials.

Countries represented by the new Dean’s Fellows include South Korea, China, India, Great Britain, Uganda and the U.S.