Accolades is an occasional News Center feature that highlights recent accomplishments of faculty and students at The University of Texas at Dallas. To submit items for consideration, contact your school’s communications manager.
Moheimani Receives ASME Draper Award
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has named Dr. Reza Moheimani, professor of systems engineering at The University of Texas at Dallas, the recipient of its 2020 Charles Stark Draper Innovative Practice Award.
Established in 1996, the biennial award recognizes a member of the Dynamic Systems and Control Division of ASME for excellent sustained contributions in innovative applications of dynamic systems, measurement or control in engineering practice.
“I am grateful and humbled to receive the Draper award from Dynamic Systems and Control Division of ASME,” said Moheimani, holder of the James Von Ehr Distinguished Chair in Science and Technology in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. “Being recognized by your peers for your past research contributions is a true honor. I have had the good fortune of working with outstanding graduate students and postdocs in Australia and the United States, and benefited immensely from long-term collaborations with dedicated researchers all over world, too many to name here. I want to be clear that whatever I have done, I have done with others, and this award recognizes efforts of many of those with whom I have worked.”
Moheimani’s interdisciplinary work encompasses several areas of systems research at the nanoscale, including high precision microscopy and atomic scale manufacturing. He founded the Laboratory for Dynamics and Control of Nanosystems soon after joining the Jonsson School in 2015.
“This is a huge award and well deserved. Needless to say, we are very proud to count Professor Moheimani among our faculty in systems engineering at UT Dallas,” said Dr. Stephen Yurkovich, head of the Department of Systems Engineering and Louis Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Chair.
In 2019 Moheimani received a $2.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop new enabling technologies for atomically precise manufacturing, a type of 3D printing at the atomic scale. The ultimate goal of this effort is to realize novel instruments and systems for high-speed and high-throughput fabrication of devices with atomic precision. An immediate application for these technologies will be in the development of novel solid-state quantum devices and, in particular, next-generation quantum computers. With UT Dallas funding, Moheimani established the Center for Atomically Precise Fabrication of Solid-State Quantum Devices (Quantum Center).
Moheimani was awarded a recent U.S. patent in 2019 for methods, devices and systems for scanning tunneling microscopy control system design. He also is the author of more than 350 journal articles and editor-in-chief of Mechatronics. Moheimani is a fellow of three major organizations: the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the International Federation of Automatic Control and the Institute of Physics in the United Kingdom.
Jindal School Students Earn Scholar Awards
One current Master of Business Administration student and two recent alumni from the Naveen Jindal School of Management at UT Dallas each have been awarded $15,000 Mitchell Family Foundation Scholar Awards from the Texas Business Hall of Fame Foundation.
The Texas Business Hall of Fame (TBHF) was formed in 1982 to honor outstanding business leaders in Texas and to inspire the leaders of the future by funding scholarships that help recipients pursue their business educations in Texas schools.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the executive committee of the TBHF Foundation’s board of directors decided that students who had existing relationships with their universities would be eligible for the awards even if they did not enroll for the fall semester.
“We asked ourselves whether the candidates’ startup ideas could realistically be launched at this time. Even candidates who have successful or promising startups found themselves in a situation that is challenging at best. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures,” said Dr. Diane McNulty, associate dean of external affairs and corporate development at the Jindal School and vice president for scholar award and endowment for the TBHF Foundation.
This year’s recipients from UT Dallas are:
Brittany Brunson, an MBA student who works at Southwest Airlines as an associate manager on the customer experience planning and delivery team, is a co-founder of Brunson Bump System, a company that develops a sorority recruitment software tool.
Philip Miller, who graduated in May with a master’s degree in marketing, co-owns Crull Fitness, a performance training facility in Richardson. He will continue pursuit of his MBA in the spring.
Gaurav Sethi, who graduated in May with bachelor’s degrees in finance and actuarial science, is a risk analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and the chief financial officer at CampusOven, a company he founded as a UT Dallas student that connects University employees and students with caterers who are focused on healthy-eating options. He plans to enroll next spring in the graduate innovation and entrepreneurship program.