MHT Students – CARD Presentation Winners

MHT Students – CARD Presentation Winners

By Victoria Birk Hill October 15, 2025

With the winning students are from left to right: Patricia Howe, CARD Program Manager; Amir Malvandi, CARD UIUC Site Co-Director; Srinivasa Salapaka, CARD UIUC Site Director; Stephen Cobbe, Kerry – CARD IAB Co-Chair; Dee Hoffman, VentureWell – NSF Center Evaluator; Xue Liu, BASF – CARD IAB Chair; Jamal Yagoobi, WPI, CARD Director; and Yuxiang (Shawn) Liu, CARD WPI Co-Director.

We are pleased to announce that MHT students, Itamar Harris, Mana Masrouri, and Zahra Nazariharavani were winners of the presentation competition at CARD’s Fall Industry Advisory Board meeting, October 8-10, 2025 at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA.

Itamar Harris tied for first place for her work on “Heating, Baking, and Drying with Laser Technology for Food, Pulp and Paper, and Chemicals Industry Sectors”, along with Mana Masrouri, who also tied for first place for her research on “Hybrid EHD Driven Heat Pump for Moderate/High Temperature Drying – A Novel Energy Efficiency Technology”.

Zahra Nazariharavani received an honorable mention for her work on “Performance Evaluation of Atmospheric Plasma Pretreatment for Enhanced Drying in CARD Smart Dryer”.

Zahra Nazariharavani received an honorable mention for her work on “Performance Evaluation of Atmospheric Plasma Pretreatment for Enhanced Drying in CARD Smart Dryer”. She worked in collaboration on the project with Yanyao Yu of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

We are very proud of these three MHT students. Great work!