Dean of Engineering Mun Y. Choi recently announced the selection of four faculty members to receive the United Technologies Corporation (UTC) Professorship in Engineering Innovation award. The recipients include Drs. Emmanouil Anagnostou of Civil & Environmental Engineering; Jun-Hong Cui of Computer Science & Engineering; Shengli Zhou of Electrical & Computer Engineering; and K.S. Wilson Chiu of Mechanical Engineering.
“These four faculty members exemplify not only excellence in their fields of research, but also within the academic community, where every day they demonstrate the highest ideals of our profession,” said Dean Choi in announcing the awards.
The UTC Professorship in Engineering Innovation award debuted in July 2008 as a means to recognize superb faculty members at the Assistant and Associate Professor ranks who have attained exceptional achievements in their areas of research. The three-year awards confer $5,000 annually to each recipient for the purposes of professional development and growth. No more than one award per department is made at a time.
The awardees were selected by their departments as exemplifying scholarly excellence in research, teaching and service, and for their promise of continued future accomplishments.
Dr. Anagnostou, who joined UConn in 1999, was previously awarded a National Science Foundation Early Career Development (NSF CAREER) award, the Marie Curie Excellence Award, the European Geophysical Union Plinius Medal, and a NASA New Investigator Program Award. His research interests encompass remote sensing of precipitation processes and analysis and prediction of atmospheric and surface hydrologic variables through the assimilation of remotely sensed data in dynamic models and physically based radiometric algorithms.
Since joining UConn in 2003, Dr. Cui has garnered an NSF CAREER award and an Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program award. Her research involves the design, modelling, and performance evaluation of networks and distributed systems. In particular, she is interested in underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) for a variety of commercial and military applications, such as anti-submarine warfare, mine countermeasures, and battle space environmental monitoring.
Dr. Zhou joined the University of Connecticut in 2003 and previously received an ONR Young Investigator Program award. His research involves multi-user communications, multi-carrier communications, space-time coding, adaptive modulation, and cross-layer designs for wireless systems. Dr. Zhou’s YIP funding supports his development of a multicarrier acoustic modem with channel- and network-adaptivity for underwater autonomous distributed systems.
Dr. Chiu previously received an NSF CAREER Award, an ONR Young Investigator Program award, the ASME Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer, and an Army Research Office Young Investigator award. His research interests include transport phenomena in the material processing of nanostructured materials, with applications in chemical vapor deposition (CVD), carbon nanotube, fuel cell, photonics and semiconductor manufacture. Dr. Chiu joined UConn in 1999.
