2016 SEAS Faculty Awards Celebration

The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences recognizes faculty excellence in teaching and research through an awards program. Recipients are nominated by fellow faculty and vetted by a SEAS Awards committee.

This year's award recipients are as follows.

Best Teaching Faculty of the Year Award

This award is presented to teaching faculty members for outstanding educational contributions to SEAS.

Winner:

Kris Schindler, Computer Science and Engineering, for teaching a series of computer hardware courses, writing a textbook on microprocessors, and his dedicated service in ASEE and UB’s Chapter of Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honors Society.

Liesl Folks and Kris Schindler.

Early Career Researcher of the Year Award

This award is presented to assistant professors for outstanding research contributions to SEAS.

Liesl Folks and Panagiotis Ch. Anastasopoulos

Winners:

Panagiotis Ch. Anastasopoulos, Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, for important contributions to transportation engineering, with emphasis on roadway vehicle crashes and strategies to reduce such crashes.

Liesl Folks and Yun Wu

Yun Wu, Biomedical Engineering, for innovative work in the area of nanomedicine and biosensors that has been published in top rated journals, such as Nature Nanotechnology and Small and Biomaterials.

Liesl Folks and Wenyao Xu

Wenyao Xu, Computer Science and Engineering, for outstanding work in embedded systems, wireless health and security that has been published at prestigious computer science conferences and in biomedical engineering journals.

Early Career Teacher of the Year Award

This award is presented to assistant professors for outstanding educational contributions to SEAS.

Winners:

Varun Chandola, Computer Science and Engineering, for incorporating modern technologies in education to develop unique educational resources that have allowed him to deliver high quality education while handling large class sizes in the area of machine learning.

Liesl Folks and Varun Chandola

Jihyung Yoo, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, for the remarkable transformation of MAE335: Fluid Mechanics, which historically has been one of the most difficult courses in the ME and AE curricula.

Liesl Folks and Jihyung Yoo

Lukasz Ziarek, Computer Science and Engineering, for his impactful teaching of several CSE courses and his efforts in establishing a center for computer science education.

Liesl Folks and Lukasz Ziarek

Senior Researcher of the Year Award

This award is presented to associate or full professors for outstanding recent research contributions to SEAS.

Liesl Folks with Murat Demirbas

Winners:

Murat Demirbas, Computer Science and Engineering, for his high impact research in the broad area of distributed networked systems, including cloud/datacenter computing, wireless sensor networks, and smartphone-sourced sensing and collaboration.

Liesl Folks with Kemper E. Lewis

Kemper E. Lewis, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, for his pioneering contributions in the field of design automation addressing challenging problems in complex system design, decision networks, design analytics, decision theory and adaptive optimization.

Andrew S. Whittaker, Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, for his significant and lasting contributions in earthquake and blast engineering of buildings, bridges, and mission critical infrastructure.

Senior Teacher of the Year Award

This award is presented to associate or full professors for outstanding recent educational contributions to SEAS.

Winners:

Bharat Jayaraman, Computer Science and Engineering, for contributions to the effective teaching and learning of object-oriented programming, to UB’s global reach, and for creation of the Master of Science degree program in Embedded Systems.

Liesl Folks with Bharat Jayaraman

Edward P. Furlani, Chemical and Biological Engineering/Electrical Engineering, for excellence in teaching fundamental principles in computational mathematics and circuit theory to chemical and electrical engineering students, and excellence in interdisciplinary teaching of optofluidics.