Three Whiting School of Engineering affiliates are inaugural winners of prizes established to honor the legacy of renowned condensed matter and statistical physicist Mark O. Robbins, who died in 2020.
The winners of the Mark O. Robbins Prize in High-Performance Computing are Karthik Menon, a doctoral candidate and member of Rajat Mittal’s lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Andrew Ruttinger, a doctoral candidate and a member of Paulette Clancy’s lab in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
Menon’s research focuses on the development of computational and data-driven techniques to study the interaction of fluids with flexible and moving surfaces within liquid flows. Ruttinger focuses on using computational modeling to develop insights into quantum dot photovoltaics, lithium extraction from low-concentration sources, and the development of thermal energy storage.
Postdoctoral fellow Sai Pooja Mahajan is the winner of the Robbins Future Faculty Award. She focuses on developing and applying computational techniques aimed at solving complex problems in computational lithography and computational protein structure, function, and design. She is a member of Jeffrey Gray’s lab in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
All three honorees received cash prizes and plaques, and were invited to present their work at a virtual High Performance Computing Symposium held last August.