Faculty Highlights

David Bevly, the Bill and Lana McNair Professor of mechanical engineering, and Scott Martin, assistant research professor of mechanical engineering, were awarded $4.63 million in funding from 16 sponsors during the first 11 months of the 2019 fiscal year.

Imon Chakraborty, assistant professor of aerospace engineering, and Roy Hartfield, the Walt and Virginia Woltosz Professor of aerospace engineering, were awarded a $540,000 grant from NASA for their research on stability and control characteristics of advanced and novel aircraft.

Selen Cremaschi, the B. Redd Associate Professor of chemical engineering, was named in the Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research journal’s 2018 Class of Influential Researchers.

Virginia Davis, the Alumni Professor of chemical engineering, was invited to join the editorial board of the journal PLOS One.

Sean Gallagher, the Hal N. and Peggy S. Pennington Associate

Professor of industrial and systems engineering, was named a fellow of the Human Factors and CILLUFFO TESTIFIES

Frank Cilluffo, director of Auburn University’s McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security, testified before a subcommittee of Congress’ Committee on Homeland Security in June 2019, speaking about the cybersecurity challenges that state and local governments face and how the federal government can help. “We must work to safeguard the continuity of commerce and the delivery of mission-critical services for the American people,” Cilluffo testified. “Unless and until we foster and have in place a robust baseline capability across the board, from a state and local standpoint, we will remain more vulnerable than we ought to be to nation-state and non-state cyber actors with malicious intent.” Cilluffo has publicly testified before Congress on numerous occasions and is routinely called upon to advise senior officials in the executive branch, U.S. Armed Services, and state and local governments on an array of matters related to national and homeland security strategy and policy. Prior to joining Auburn in September 2018, Cilluffo led the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University. Following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Cilluffo was appointed by President George W. Bush to the newly created Office of Homeland Security. There, he was involved in a wide range of homeland security and counterterrorism strategies, policy initiatives and served as a principal advisor to Director Tom Ridge, directing the president’s Homeland Security Advisory Council. Cilluffo is also a member of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission and the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council. He has presented at a number of bi-lateral and multi-lateral summits on cybersecurity and countering terrorism, including the U.N. Security Council.

Ergonomics Society.

Greg Harris, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering and director of the Southern Alliance for Advanced Vehicle Manufacturing, was awarded a $322,849 grant from the National Institute for Standards and Technology for research on developing a distributed manufacturing network.

Elizabeth Lipke, the Mary and John H. Sanders Associate Professor of chemical engineering, is directing a $960,600 program that will train six doctoral fellows in the area of biomaterials engineering and biomanufacturing. The interdisciplinary program is sponsored by a U.S. Department of Education grant.

Joseph Majdalani, the Francis Chair of aerospace engineering, was awarded a $386,553 grant from the National Science Foundation for his research on predicting and mitigating undesirable acoustic phenomena in combustors and power generation systems.

Shiwen Mao, the Samuel Ginn Professor of electrical

and computer engineering

and director of the Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center, was elected a fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to wireless multimedia networking.

Mark Schall, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering, received a Mentored Research Scientist Development Award from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The project, worth $324,000, is titled “Advancing Workplace Safety Surveillance with Ambulatory Inertial Sensors.”

Alice Smith, the Joe W. Forehand/ Accenture Distinguished Professor in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, was named editor-inchief of the INFORMS Journal on Computing.

Puneet Srivastava, the ButlerCunningham Eminent Scholar of biosystems engineering, was named a fellow of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers. He was also named a fellow of the Alabama Academy of Sciences.

David Timm, the Brasfield & Gorrie Professor of pavements and materials engineering in the Department of Civil Engineering, was awarded the 2019 National James M. Robbins Excellence in Teaching Award by the Chi Epsilon National Civil Engineering Honor Society.

David Umphress, the COLSA Corporation Cyber Security and Information Assurance professor of computer science and software engineering and director of the Auburn Cyber Research Center, and Dean Hendrix, associate professor of computer science and software engineering, were awarded $750,000 from the Army’s Program Executive Office Missiles and Space to assess the cybersecurity vulnerability of air defense systems.

Jin Wang, the Walt and Virginia FLEXING RESEARCH MUSCLE

Pradeep Lall, the John and Anne MacFarlane Professor of mechanical engineering and director of the NextFlex Harsh Environment Node housed at Auburn University, had his research featured at the 2018 NextFlex Innovation Day in San Jose, California. NextFlex is America’s Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Institute. Lall is the lead inventor of the Auburn University Biometric Band, a flexible wristband that uses a suite of sensors to monitor body functions, which was featured at the NextFlex Innovation Day. “The band monitors remote workers,” Lall said. “So, for example, someone working in a hazardous environment — they might be wearing this band, which is monitoring physiological functions continuously and transmitting that information to a paired smartphone.” The job Lall specifically had in mind when designing the Flexible Biometric Band was the inspection of cramped aircraft fuel tanks. Airline safety literature on the topic warns of claustrophobia, which can lead to a heightened pulse rate and lack of consciousness. Other risk factors in the fuel tank environment, such as low levels of oxygen, can lead to myocardial infarction, stroke or even aneurysm. The AU Biometric Band was also highlighted in a Voice of America feature filmed during NextFlex’s 2018 Flexible Electronics Conference and Exhibition. Lall was also recognized as a NextFlex fellow at the 2019 FLEX conference in Monterey, California, for his work in advancing the adoption of flexible hybrid electronics in the manufacturing, defense and aerospace industries, as well as in emerging technologies and medical applications.

Woltosz Professor of chemical engineering, and Peter He, associate professor of chemical engineering, were awarded a $1.1 million grant from the Department of Energy for their research on methanotroph-photoautotroph interactions for biogas conversions to fuel.

Huaguo Zhou, professor of civil engineering, and Rod Turochy, the James Madison Hunnicutt Professor in traffic engineering, were awarded a $600,000 project from the Transportation Research Board’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program for their research on wrong-way

driving crashes.