Charles Meneveau, the Louis M. Sardella Professor in Mechanical Engineering and associate director of the Institute for Data-Intensive Science and Engineering (IDIES), was awarded the 2024 G K Batchelor Prize “for his high-impact fundamental contributions to the study of turbulence and wall-bounded flows, and for bringing insightful and rigorous fluid mechanics to the science of wind turbines and wind farms for the benefit of society.”
Stavroula Sofou, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, was awarded the 2023 Dionisopoulou Prize by the the Academy of Athens, Greece’s highest research establishment, for her work on simultaneously targeting many regions of solid tumors using the same cancer therapeutic but with different delivery methods. These variations can impact how drugs are delivered, absorbed, and distributed within the tumor tissue.
Alexander Szalay, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, a professor in the Department of Computer Science, and the director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science, was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest and most prestigious society of computing professionals, “for transformative contributions to computing science and technology.”
Natalia Trayanova, the Murray B. Sachs Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and a professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was distinguished with the 2025 Hodgkin-Huxley-Katz Prize Lecture by the Physiological Society, recognizing her groundbreaking contributions to cardiovascular science and physiological research. She lectures on the findings of Hodgkin, Huxley, and Katz in her junior core BME undergraduate class and considers them “one of the most fundamental discoveries in biology/physiology.”
Soledad Villar, assistant professor of applied mathematics and statistics, was awarded the NSF Early CAREER Award. Her project, “Symmetries and Classical Physics in Machine Learning for Science and Engineering,” will blend invariant theory, representation theory, differential geometry, and classical physics to facilitate advanced coordinate-free machine learning methods with a particular focus on applications in representation learning and physics emulation within the domains of cosmology and climate science.
Thi Vo, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, received the AFOSR Young Investigator Program award for “Synthetic-Biological LEGOs—Designing Versatile Nanoscale Synthons for Self-Assembly.” This award enhances early career development of outstanding young investigators and increases opportunities for the young investigators to engage in forwarding the Department of the Air Force’s mission and related challenges in science and engineering.