The first half of January brings exciting honors and funding awards for UT staff and students: Four Faculty Members Named 2021 Chancellor’s Professors; UT’s NSBE Team Dominates at Regional Conference; Assistant Professor of Engineering Receives Dissertation Award; CEE Graduate Research Assistant Awarded for Bisphenol A (BPA) Research; Seven Student Start-Ups Awarded Funding.
Four Faculty Members Named 2021 Chancellor’s Professors
Chancellor Donde Plowman has named four senior faculty members as the new class of Chancellor’s Professors at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville—Ted Stank, Kevin Tomsovic, Robert Trigiano, and Penny White. This designation honors extraordinary scholarly attainment in an individual discipline or field and a record of excellence in teaching and service to the university.
UT’s NSBE Team Dominates at Regional Conference
UT’s NSBE chapter won the Academic Tech Bowl at the 2021 NSBE Fall Regional Conference, the third year in a row that the team from UT has done so. The Academic Tech Bowl is held at both the regional and national conferences and is formatted as a “Jeopardy-style” competition. NSBE chapters from attending universities solve problems in subjects like calculus, chemistry, and thermodynamics, among others.
Aziz Receives Dissertation Award
Assistant Professor Ahmedullah Aziz received the ACM SIGDA Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award for 2021 at the Design Automation Conference in November 2021. The award consists of a certificate and a check for $1,000 and is selected by a committee of experts from academia and industry in the field and appointed by ACM in consultation with the SIGDA Chair. His dissertation was titled “Device-Circuit Co-Design Employing Phase Transition Materials for Low power Electronics.”
Yanchen Sun Awarded for Bisphenol A (BPA) Research
CEE graduate research assistant Yanchen Sun won the Student Paper Competition Award from the 2022 Eleventh International Conference on the Remediation and Management of Contaminated Sediments.
Sun, who studies under UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair in Microbiology Frank Loeffler, was recognized for his research, “Is Adsorbed Bisphenol A (BPA) Degradable?”
Seven Student Start-Ups Awarded Funding
Seven UT student businesses received cash prizes in the fall 2021 Graves Business Plan Competition. The event, hosted each semester by the Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in UT’s Haslam College of Business, awards three levels of prizes in two business categories: Growth and Lifestyle. This was the 17th Graves Business Plan Competition. Open to UT students enrolled in undergraduate and master’s degree programs in any field of study, the contest offers student entrepreneurs the opportunity to win start-up funds for original business ideas.