Honorees have demonstrated outstanding service, teaching, inventorship and commercialization.
 

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The College of Engineering has announced the third annual Faculty Awards, honoring eight faculty members for their excellence in research, service, teaching, inventorship, and commercialization.

Candidates were nominated by their peers or submitted self-nominations. Materials were reviewed by a committee of academic and research faculty members within the College. Each honoree receives $2,000.

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Saad Bhamla

Outstanding Faculty Achievement in Research Award (Early Career)

Saad Bhamla
Assistant Professor
School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Bhamla focuses on the physics of living systems, uncovering the principles underlying ultrafast movements in biology to inform the design of bioinspired robotics. He’s regularly called on to share his expertise with top-tier media outlets. In recent years, he’s been featured for his work on cicadas, worm blobs, and leaping springtails

Bhamla also is involved in the emerging field of frugal science, developing affordable and accessible tools for global health. His inventive solutions include a 20-cent paper centrifuge, 23-cent electroporator, and 96-cent hearing aid.

Outstanding Faculty Achievement in Research Award (Midcareer)

Wilbur Lam
W. Paul Bowers Research Chair, Professor
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Associate Dean for Innovation, Emory School of Medicine

Lam’s research focuses on developing and applying micro- and nanotechnologies to study, diagnose, and treat blood disorders, cancer, and childhood diseases. His lab also works to create inexpensive technologies that allow children and their families to diagnose and monitor their own conditions at home. He also led a national project to evaluate diagnostic tests for Covid-19 — a test-the-tests effort that was responsible for getting Covid-19 at-home rapid tests widely available on store shelves during the pandemic.

Lam was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2023. Membership is considered one of the highest recognitions in health and medicine.

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Wilbur Lam headshot
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Zhongyun Liu

Outstanding Faculty Achievement in Research Award (Research Faculty)

Zhongyun Liu
Research Engineer I
School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Liu’s work focuses on creating scalable polyimide and carbon molecular sieve (CMS) membranes for industrial gas separations. Liu’s research has made substantial contributions toward enabling the transition to less energy-intensive gas separation processes with reduced carbon footprints.

For example, Liu has created CMS membranes that perform well across a wide range of industrially important gas pairs, such as natural gas purification and propylene/propane separation. His research offers strategies to control physical aging and use it as a valuable tool to tune the separation performance of CMS membranes for demanding gas separations. 

Outstanding Teacher Award (Early Career)

Daniel Molzahn
Assistant Professor
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

In addition to his research on energy systems, Molzahn has a goal of educating the next generation of electric power engineers. For instance, he leads a 30-student Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) team that develops video game simulations of power grids operating during extreme events. A first iteration of the game currently is installed at the Georgia Tech Dataseum in the Price Gilbert Library and plans are underway to incorporate a version into next year’s Seth Bonder high school summer camps.

While vice-chairing and chairing the Power Systems Computation Conference, he worked to record and publish 200+ videos of conference presentations on YouTube, forming the basis for class assignments that placed students in the role of National Science Foundation (NSF) program managers critiquing the latest research. He also used NSF funding to help develop a virtual reality simulation of a substation, providing students the opportunity to work with high-voltage hardware that would otherwise be inaccessible. 

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Daniel Molzahn
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Yonathan Thio headshot

Outstanding Teacher Award (Midcareer or Senior)

Yonathan Thio
Senior Lecturer
School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Students in Thio’s courses don’t take typical notes. Rather, 20 years ago he started giving students “fill-in-the-blanks” cards to promote active listening and learning. It’s just one way Thio takes unique approaches to teaching his students. He also uses “Muddy Cards,” which students use to inform him of topics that were confusing during lectures. The topics are covered again in the next class. 

Thio serves on ChBE’s Undergraduate Curriculum committee and has advocated for — and then helped implement — updates that include numerical methods in core courses. He also has developed tools to gather and analyze data on student progress and uses them to help academic advisors in their efforts to help students who are not progressing in their major core courses. 

Outstanding Achievement as an Inventor Award

F. Levent Degertekin
George W. Woodruff Chair in Mechanical Systems and Professor
George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Degertekin’s research group uses acoustics and optics concepts to creatively address a wide variety of important engineering problems, such as acoustic and seismic measurements, medical ultrasound imaging, and sensors for magnetic resonance imaging.

Degertekin is an inventor or co-inventor on 65 U.S. patents and six international patents. More than 50 of them are granted for his work at Georgia Tech with his students and collaborators. His compact, micromachined optical interferometers form the basis of seismometers used by major oil companies and the technology is part of a NASA project that will someday explore Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter.

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Levent Degertekin headshot
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Lakshmi Dasi headshot

Outstanding Achievement in Commercialization and Entrepreneurship Award

Lakshmi “Prasad” Dasi
Rozelle Vanda Wesley Professor
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Dasi develops and translates heart valve technology that helps lower healthcare costs and allows doctors to personalize treatment, reducing disparities in patient outcomes.

He owns 10 patents, has another 10 pending, and has two Federal Drug Administration-cleared products through his startup company, DASI Simulations. One of them, a software tool, uses CT scan angiograms to build 3D models and an interactive platform for doctors to simulate surgery before they insert heart valves into patients. To date, nearly 1,200+ patients have benefitted from the technology, which is being used in approximately 105+ U.S. hospitals.

Outstanding Service Award

Jonathan Colton
Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. Professorship in Manufacturing, Professor
George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Colton is chair of Georgia Tech’s Institute Statutes Committee, and he serves on the Faculty Executive Board and the Institute Steering Committee. He has taken an active role in rewriting significant portions of the faculty handbook related to the reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT), annual evaluations, and post-tenure review (PTR) processes.

Within the Woodruff School, Colton was responsible for coordinating and leading a rewrite of the faculty handbook to include policy changes from the Board of Regents. This included the RPT and PTR processes. He also chaired the School’s tenured faculty annual evaluation committee.

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Jonathan Colton headshot
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