Accolades: Notable Faculty and Student Achievements
Rack Research Earns AVS Fellowship
Professor Phillip Rack has built a career out of the study of thin films, materials that can be smaller than a nanometer in thickness yet hold tremendous promise for fields such as electronics and computing.
Rack, the Leonard G. Penland Chair in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, utilizes vacuum conditions at pressures well below atmospheric levels to help in his studies.
In recognition of his expertise in such technology, the American Vacuum Society (AVS) has named him a 2018 fellow of the society.
“Earning recognition from your peers is a tremendous honor,” said Rack. “It is a validation of years of research and effort, and I couldn’t be prouder to have been selected.”
AVS was founded in 1953 to help bring better connectivity between materials science and related fields. It now counts more than 4,500 members across a number of divisions.
In addition to being named a fellow, Rack also currently serves on the executive committee of the Thin Film Division for AVS.
He has helped author more than 100 refereed journal articles and given more than 130 presentations at conferences around the world.
Since coming to UT in 2001, Rack has won the department’s engineering faculty research award; the college’s research fellow award and Allen and Hoshall Engineering Faculty award; and the chancellor’s award for research and creative achievement.
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Udaphyaya Award Maintains Faculty Tradition
Professor Emeritus Belle Upadhyaya received the American Nuclear Society Don Miller Award in June at the society’s meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The first award recipient was Professor Robert Uhrig in 2010, former UT nuclear engineering faculty and distinguished scientist. Professor Rafael Perez received it in 2011, making Upadhyaya the third UT nuclear engineering professor to receive the award.
The award recognizes the culmination of a recipient’s career in the area of nuclear instrumentation and control or human-machine interface. It was established in 2009 and named after Don W. Miller, professor and distinguished program chair at the Ohio State University Nuclear Engineering Program, a prior member of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, and past ANS President.
The Miller Award is given to an individual or team that has made recognized contributions to the advancement of one or both of the fields of nuclear instrumentation and control or human-machine interface through individual or combined activities that reflect Miller’s life and contributions.
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Industrious Jin Named Industrial Fellow
Mingzhou Jin, professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, was recently elected to be a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE).
The IISE Fellow award is in recognition of outstanding leaders of the profession who have made significant, nationally recognized contributions to industrial engineering.
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Rizk Takes on CRUD to Tie for Nuclear Win
Jason Rizk, a second-year nuclear engineering graduate student in Professor Brian Wirth’s research group, tied for the win in the student poster competition at the recent American Nuclear Society meeting on Nuclear Fuels and Structural Materials (NFSM) in Philadelphia.
The title of his poster was “Evaluation of Precipitation Thermodynamics in MAMBA-3D.” It focused on the modeling of corrosion productions, referred to as CRUD on nuclear fuel rods.
Rizk is a NEUP graduate student fellowship holder.
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Knecht Nets Power Scholarship
Nuclear engineering senior Kalie Knecht received the Robert N. Hubby Scholarship from the International Society of Automation Power Industry Division (ISA POWID).
This scholarship is awarded annually to a student in a power-generation curriculum at an accredited college or university and nominated by a member of the Power Industry Division.
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