Awards, Honors, and Recognitions

Elizabeth Stewart, assistant professor of chemical engineering, received a $200,000 National Science Foundation Engineering Research Initiation grant, a prestigious early-career award aimed at supporting new researchers as part of the NSF’s efforts to build engineering research capacity across the nation. Stewart will engineer an innovative microfluidic model to look specifically at how bacteria build biofilms on catheters inserted into blood vessels. This research aims to unravel how blood vessels and blood flow change the design and strength of those biofilms.

Assistant Professor of Teaching Ahmet (Can) Sabuncu, mechanical engineering,
has been named a 2023 Engineering Unleashed Fellow. This prestigious designation recognizes his outstanding leadership in undergraduate engineering education and his significant contributions to the greater Engineering Unleashed community. The program is supported by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network, a partnership of more than 55 colleges and universities across the country.

Elke Rundensteiner, the William Smith Dean’s Professor in Computer Science and founding head of the Data Science Program, recently received the InfoVis 20-Year Test-of-Time Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for her pioneering work on data visualization and visual analytics in 2003. This award honors articles published at previous IEEE VIS (Visual Identification System) conferences, in this case in 2003, that have withstood the test of time by remaining useful 20 years later and that have had significant impact and influence on future advances within and beyond the visualization community, according to the award’s organizers. Award selection is based on measures such as the numbers of citations, the quality and influence of its ideas, and other criteria. Rundensteiner and her team, which included the late computer science professor Matthew Ward and former PhD students Jing Yang and Wei Peng, were honored for their work on interactive hierarchical dimension ordering, spacing, and filtering for the exploration of high-dimensional datasets.

President Grace Wang has named Professor Art Heinricher as WPI’s interim senior vice president and provost. In the announcement, Wang wrote, “Art’s reputation as a collaborative, empathetic, and respected leader precedes him. Serving as a professor of mathematical sciences since 1992, dean of undergraduate studies for 14 years, and interim provost last year, he is highly committed to the success of our students, the excellence of our academic programs, and WPI’s mission. Art is knowledgeable about WPI’s academic operation, and genuinely supports our faculty and staff. I am confident that he will bring our faculty, staff, and students together and help accelerate the momentum to advance our academic enterprise.”

Assistant Professor Christina Bailey-Hytholt, chemical engineering, was selected
for the prestigious AIChE 35 Under 35 Award. One of six awardees in the bioengineering category, she was recognized for her impactful work on developing new biomaterials and drug delivery vehicles influencing fundamental understanding and treatment strategies for reproductive health complications. AIChE says the award honors “35 chemical engineering professionals under the age of 35 who have made great contributions to the field, as well as to AIChE. These award winners embody what it is to be an accomplished chemical engineer.”