Tarunraj Singh recognized with IEEE Outstanding Teaching Award

By Elizabeth Egan 

Singh, a professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is being honored for his development of courses in system identification and estimation control. He was nominated for the award by Quanxi Jia, a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Materials Design and Innovation.

“I admire Tarun’s teaching philosophy, helping students learn how to learn,” said Jia. “He has already earned numerous university, regional, and national teaching awards.”

Singh came to the University at Buffalo as an assistant professor in 1993 and became a full professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 2005.

“UB had multiple internationally recognized faculty in my research domain which made it an attractive institution to launch my academic career,” Singh said.

After becoming a professor, Singh worked to maintain the student interactions that he experienced with the faculty at Texas A&M University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. Singh said that the opportunity to work with faculty and solve different research problems was a main factor in his decision to become a professor himself, so he tries to bring those same opportunities to his students.

“I recall a moment at a graduate student’s seminar when I asked a question about the mechanism of the manifestation of a certain behavior in acoustic metamaterial,” Singh said. “I worked with the student and his adviser to answer the question and the collaboration resulted in a series of papers that have had a profound impact on the understanding of a fundamental behavior of metamaterial.”

Singh has published 103 articles in professional journals, won multiple best paper awards, and authored the book, Optimal Reference Shaping for Dynamical Systems: Theory and Applications.

His research interests include target tracking, human-vehicle control, optimal control, nonlinear control and dynamics and control of flexible structures.

Singh also received the Yasundo Takahashi Educational award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2021 and IEEE’s Technological Innovation Award in 2018.