Swanson School of Engineering Celebrates

NiSource President

Lloyd Yates as its Distinguished Alumnus

Postponed by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering’s 61st Distinguished Alumni Banquet finally was celebrated Thursday, April 8, 2022 in the University Club. Lloyd Yates BSMechE ‘82, President and CEO of NiSource Inc., was officially honored as the Swanson School’s Distinguished Alumnus.

Yates serves as NiSource President and Chief Executive Officer and has been in this role since February 14, 2022. He is also a member of the NiSource Board of Directors and served on the NiSource Board as an independent Director from 2020 – 2022. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc.

Previously, he held senior roles at Duke Energy Corporation, including Executive Vice President, Customer and Delivery Operations, and President, Carolinas Region. He was responsible for aligning customer focused products and services to deliver a personalized end-to-end customer experience to position Duke Energy for long term growth, as well as for the profit/loss, strategic direction, and performance of Duke Energy’s regulated utilities in North Carolina and South Carolina.

Yates also served as Executive Vice President of Regulated Utilities at Duke Energy, overseeing Duke Energy’s utility operations in six states, federal government affairs, and environmental and energy policy at the state and federal levels, as well as Executive Vice President, Customer Operations, where he led the transmission, distribution, customer services, gas operations and grid modernization functions for millions of utility customers. Earlier in his career, he held several line and management positions with PECO Energy before serving at Progress Energy in various senior roles.

Yates earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and MBA from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He attended the Advanced Management Program at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School and the Executive Management Program at the Harvard Business School.

Three faculty members

and a staff member were honored with the chancellor’s distinguished award in 2022.

Samuel Dickerson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award for his role in leading the undergraduate computer engineering program, one of the largest in the school. Dickerson also personally advises more than 300 students.

Götz Veser, Nickolas A. DeCecco Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award for his work developing a third of the classes in his department’s undergraduate curriculum. Along with developing courses and showing a willingness to teach beyond his required load, Veser created two student clubs.

John Sebastian, director of the McKamish Construction Management Program and professor of civil and environmental engineering, received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Public Service Award for co-creating the Experiencing Architecture summer program and leveraging his extensive industry experience and network to mentor students and benefit Pitt’s construction management program. Sebastian also serves on the board of the Sarah Heinz House, the ACE Mentor program, the Mascaro Construction Academy and Rebuilding Together Pittsburgh, on which he chairs its governance committee.

Jill Harvey, director of first year advising, captured the 2022 Chancellor’s Award for Staff, the highest honor for staff at Pitt. Harvey oversees all first-year programming and advising for engineering students – including making sure students are adapting emotionally and academically to college life.

Department of Bioengineering Faculty

Professors Fabrisia Ambrosio (Primary: Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation; Secondary: Department of Bioengineering) and Ramakrishna Mukkamala (Primary: Department of Bioengineering and Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine; Secondary: Electrical and Computer Engineering) were elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows, in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in medical and biological engineering.

Professor Rakie Cham was elected president of the American Society of Biomechanics. Cham is a member of the Human Movement and Balance Laboratory where her research focuses on improving postural stability and reducing falls and related musculoskeletal injuries. She holds secondary appointments in Ophthalmology and Physical Therapy.

Lecturer David Gau received a K99/R00 Career Transition Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for his work on clear cell renal cell carcinoma. The award provides $126,047 per year during his two-year fellowship, which proposes a new treatment method for the disease.

Professors Partha Roy and Jonathan Vande Geest were among the winners of the 2022 Pitt Innovation Challenge. Roy and his co-PI Christi Kolarcik, PhD, received $100,000 and a $15,000 bonus for their “Actin Against ALS” pitch; while Vande Geest and his co-PI, John Pacella, MD, were awarded $35,000 and a $15,000 bonus for their “Biocarpet” pitch.

Distinguished University Professor Savio L-Y. Woo, founding director of the Musculoskeletal Research Center, was named an Honorary Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) for his pioneering work in biomechanics. The Board of Governors of ASME unanimously elected Woo for his “dedication to joint biomechanics, exemplified by innovative use of robots; and for excellence in mentorship.”

Students & Alumi

PhD Candidate Usamma Amjad received the 2022 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship Award from the Department of Defense. The program supports graduate students in science and engineering whose work is important to the mission of the DoD. Amjad works in the Schwerdt Lab, led by Helen Schwerdt, assistant professor of bioengineering, who focuses on building implantable tools for probing multiple forms of brain activity, built for use over the entirety of a human lifetime. These tools would allow researchers to understand brain function and improve the diagnosis and treatment of neurological disorders.

The American Society of Biomechanics (ASB) selected graduate student Anna Bailes DPT ’21 to serve as a Student Representative on the ASB Executive Board. The Student Representative is responsible for managing student members of ASB, collaborating with the Executive Board, encouraging student involvement in ASB, organizing student-focused events, and serving the interests of student members.

Graduate students Christopher Cover, Brittany Egnot, Michelle Karabin, Vince Lee, Kevin Steiger, and Sara Trbojevic received F30 and F31 Predoctoral Fellowships from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The competitive fellowships allow graduate students in the health sciences to develop their research in aging and Alzheimer’s disease while earning their doctoral degrees.

PhD students Camila Garcia and Emani Hunter received scholarships from the Achievement Rewards for College Students Foundation, Inc. for their work to improve treatment for under-represented communities continued on next page and patients with neurological disorders. Garcia, recipient of ARCS’ Rivers-Zawadzki Endowed Award, is using her current research to understand how neurotransmitter flux plays a role in circadian rhythms which regulate homeostasis in the brain. Hunter, recipient of ARCS’ Crawford-Stockman Endowed Award, is focusing her research on machine learning approaches to bioimaging modalities from both human and animal MRIs to aid in the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases.

Michelle Riffitts, BSBioE ’18, DPT ’21, BioE PhD ’21, was named the 2022 Wesley C. Pickard Fellow by the Department of Bioengineering.

Recipients of this award are selected by the department chair and chosen based on academic merit. Riffitts completed her Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) through the University of Pittsburgh’s Dual DPT-PhD in Bioengineering program. She now works as a physical therapist in the outpatient orthopedic setting.

Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Faculty

In recognition of contributions to particle technology research, the World Assembly of Particle Technology presented Professor George A. Klinzing with its Lifetime Achievement Award at the Ninth World Congress on Particle Technology (WCPT) in Madrid, Spain. Klinzing, who is Emeritus Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, was feted for “a lifetime of excellence in the field of particle technology.”

WPCT is the world’s major scientific congress for particle and bulk solids technology, an international forum for research, technological development, and innovation in new technologies.

Steven R. Little, Distinguished Professor and Department Chair was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and recognized “for remarkable service to charities that advance education in science in impoverished countries and leadership in science internationally.” Little is one of four Pitt and UPMC faculty named in 2022 as AAAS Fellows, one of the most distinct honors within the scientific community, dating to 1874.

Giannis Mpourmpakis, associate professor and Bicentennial Alumni Faculty Fellow was invited to present at the 2022 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Annual Meeting’s “Spotlights in Thermodynamics and Computational Molecular Science” session. Mpourmpakis’s talk, titled ”Thermodynamic Stability of Multimetallic Nanoparticles,” highlighted recent advancements in accurately describing the thermodynamic stability of bimetallic nanoparticles through Density Functional Theory calculations and machine learning.

Students & Alumi

Benjamin Hudock ’22 was one of nine Pitt students named as Fulbright Scholars in 2022.

The US Fulbright Program grants selected students the opportunity to teach English abroad. Huduck will be headed to Brazil for the program and is one of nine Swanson School students to have earned the honor in the past decade.

Malena Rybacki ’22 was one of 24 students awarded at the Future Leaders Symposium at North Carolina State University. They presented their work on converting carbon dioxide into usable products.

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty

Associate Professor Leanne Gilbertson was named one of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists’ (AAEES) inaugural 40 Under 40 who have, either personally or as part of a team, been responsible for helping to advance the fields of Environmental Science or Environmental Engineering in a demonstrable way within the last 12 months.

Professor Lev Khazanovich received the International Society of Concrete Pavements (ISCP) Eldon J. Yoder Award for Best Paper at the 12th International Conference on Concrete Pavements. The paper, “Re-evaluation of Continuously Reinforced Concrete Pavement Structural Model“ was recognized with coauthors Lucio Salles de Salles and José Tadeu Balbo (University of Sao Paulo).

Professor Piervincenzo Rizzo was elected as a Fellow of the American Society for Nondestructive Testing (ASNT) in the Class of 2022. ASNT members with at least 15 years of professional experience in nondestructive testing and 10 years of membership are eligible to be nominated as Fellows. Selected Fellows have demonstrated their support for the organization through contributions and participation.

Professor John Sebastian, director of the McKamish Construction Management Program a, received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Public Service Award for co-creating the Experiencing Architecture summer program and leveraging his extensive industry experience and network to mentor students and benefit Pitt’s construction management program. Sebastian also serves on the board of the Sarah Heinz House, the ACE Mentor program, the Mascaro Construction Academy and Rebuilding Together Pittsburgh, on which he chairs its governance committee. Associate Professor Aleksandar Stevanovic was awarded Best Paper Award at the 2nd International Conference on Civil Engineering Fundamentals and Applications (ICCEFA’21) (Virtual Conference), November 21-23, 2021. (Dobrota, N., and Stevanovic, A., (2021).

“Modelling of Delay for Protected/Permitted Left Turning Vehicles using Multigene Genetic Programming.”)

David V.P. Sanchez, assistant professor and associate director of the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation, was awarded the Swanson School of Engineering’s Outstanding Educator Award and the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) Award for Outstanding Teaching in Environmental Engineering & Science. Sanchez previously received the 2020 Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Students & Alumni

PhD Candidate Farzaneh Azadi was named a 2022 Lifesavers Traffic Safety Scholar and will attend the Lifesavers National Conference on Highway Safety Priorities, March 12-15, one of 43 U.S. and international students selected through a competitive application process. The Lifesavers Conference showcases the latest research, evidence-based strategies, proven countermeasures, and promising new approaches for addressing the nation’s most pressing traffic safety problems.

Kaveh Barri PhD ’22 secured a postdoctoral position in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Yashar Aucie, Kaveh Barri, and Gloria Zhang won the 2022 Randall Family Big Idea Competition for developing a new class of 3D printed self-powered metamaterial implants.

Greg Banyay PhD ’19 has taken a position as an Assistant Research Professor at Penn State University’s Center for Acoustics and Vibration.

PhD student Alireza Enshaiean won the 2nd place for the Best Student Paper at the 2022 SPIE Smart Structures + Nondestructive Evaluation Conference for the paper: Enshaeian, A., Belding, M., and Rizzo, P. (2022). “A novel vibration-based method to measure stress in rails”, Proceedings Volume 12048, Health Monitoring of Structural and Biological Systems XVI; 120481C (2022) https://doi. org/10.1117/12.2612296, SPIE Smart Structures + Nondestructive Evaluation, 2022, Long Beach, California, United States.

Aron Griffin BSCE ’22 received a GEM Fellowship Award which provides students funding for graduate school through corporate sponsorships and university partnerships in order to promote opportunities for individuals to enter industry at the graduate level. Griffin’s fellowship is sponsored by Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, where he will intern as a design engineer, and Carnegie Mellon University, where Griffin will pursue a MS in computational mechanics.

Yao Huang won 2022 American Rock Mechanics Association Neville GW Cook Best Dissertation Award for her thesis entitled “Analysis of Sleeve Fracturing and Burst Experiments for Measurement of In-Situ Stress and Rock Fracture Toughness.”

Fiyinfoluwa (Fiyin) Odeniyi ’24 won the New York Association of Transportation Engineers (NYSATE) Adopt-an-Undergrad Scholarship.

PhD student Jemimaedere Ohwobete (Mima) was awarded a Pitt STRIVE PhD fellowship.

PhD students Soumaya Ouhsousou and Rodrigo Arauz Sosa were both finalists for the 2022 ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute Elasticity Committee Student Paper Competition.

PhD student Isaiah Spencer-Williams ’19 won first prize for his presentation at the Pennsylvania Water Environment Association’s 93rd Annual Technical Conference (PennTec)

James Thomas ’09 was named to the Charleston (SC) Regional Business Journal.

Forty Under 40 Class which honors top young business professionals across the Charleston region who excel in their chosen profession and provide service to their community. Thomas is a Principal and Project Manager at Thomas & Hutton in Charleston, a pr ivately held professional services company providing consulting, planning, and engineering design services related to land and infrastructure.

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty

NuSense Technology – High Spatial Resolution Optical Sensors for Harsh Environments, an innovation developed through a collaboration between the Swanson School of Engineering with the U.S. Department of Energy National Energy Technology Lab (NETL) as co-developer, was one of the recipients of the prestigious 2022 R&D 100 Award from R&D Magazine. Principal investigator and lead developer is Kevin P. Chen, the Paul E. Lego Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. NETL scientists whose work contributed to this innovation are Michael Buric and Paul Ohodnicki. Buric, an ECE alumnus and a former doctoral student with Chen, is the NETL research lead. Ohodnicki is a former NETL research scientist and now associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the Swanson School.

Brandon Grainger, Eaton faculty fellow, associate professor and associate director of the Energy GRID Institute, was recognized for his inspiration to others in the classroom. Grainger received an honorable mention for the Most Inspiring Educator Award through the Carnegie Science Center. The award is granted to any grade-level educator that “inspires their students to learn, grow, question, and explore their interests.” continued on next page

Assistant Professor Robert Kerestes received the Provost’s Award for Diversity in the Curriculum. The award recognizes a faculty member’s efforts to integrate diversity and inclusion concepts into courses and curricula at Pitt. Kerestes was honored for efforts incorporating teamwork, gamification, and diversity and inclusion best practices into his Electromagnetics course (ECE 1259), a core course for undergraduates in electrical engineering.

Senior Vice Chancellor for Research Rob A. Rutenbar received the 2021 SIGDA Pioneering Achievement Award from the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM SIGDA) for his “extraordinary leadership in analog design automation and general EDA education.” This award recognizes outstanding contributions within the scope of electronic design automation (EDA) and is based on the impact of the awardee’s work during their lifetime. Rutenbar holds Distinguished Professor appointments in the School of Computing and Information and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Students

PhD student Yubo Du won the 3rd place at ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA) University Demonstration at the 59th IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC), for her outstanding demonstration by using multimodality neural network model deployed on embedded GPU to do real time human sentiment analysis. She has also been selected as a DAC Young Fellow. PhD student Jinming Zhuang was selected as a 2021 Design Automation Conference (DAC) Young Fellow and won the Best Research Video Award for his outstanding research review presentation.

Engineering Science

Noah French, engineering science sophomore, has been selected for the extremely competitive Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the US Department of Commerce.

As a scholarship winner, French will receive up to $9500 per academic year to support his studies, along with paid summer internship opportunities at NOAA facilities across the United States.

The scholarship was established in 2005 and is named in honor of retired South Carolina Senator Ernest F. Hollings. The purpose of the program is to increase undergraduate training in oceanic and atmospheric science, research, technology and education; to increase the public understanding and support for stewardship of the ocean and atmosphere; as well as prepare students for public service careers with NOAA and in related fields of study.

Department of Industrial Engineering Faculty

Professor Joel Haight was elected Fellow of the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP), the world’s oldest professional safety organization. Haight conducts research on topics such as human factors engineering, biomechanics and safety engineering and has published more than 70 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, book chapters and proceedings papers. He has been an ASSP member since 1985 and served on the Society’s Board of Directors from 2018-21.

Lisa Maillart, Interim Chair of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, has been selected for the Class of 2022-2023 of Drexel University’s Executive Leadership in Academic Technology, Engineering and Science (ELATES) program. ELATES is a national leadership development program designed to promote women in academic STEM fields, and faculty allies of all genders, into institutional leadership roles.

Students

Seniors Nicole Lipa and Gloria Givler were awarded scholarships from the Institute of Industrial and Systems of Engineers for academic excellence and campus leadership.” To be eligible, students must have a grade point average over 3.4. Awards are valued up to $4,000.

Lipa, recipient of the Harold and Inge Marcus Scholarship, recently finished her co-op at Connors Group, a management consultancy, where she worked as an analyst. On campus, she is the vice president of professional development for Pitt’s Society of Women Engineers. She is also involved in Incline Consulting Group, a student-run organization that offers pro-bono strategic and technology consulting to nonprofit organizations. Givler, recipient of the Dwight D. Gardner Scholarship, is in her third co-op rotation at Seegrid, an automated material handling equipment company located in Pittsburgh. She is also the mentorship chair for Pitt’s Society of Women Engineers and volunteers with All in PA to help students register to vote. She said she is honored to receive this award.

Ayushi Gupta ’22 won First Place at the IISE Student Paper Technical Competition in competition with schools from across the Northeastern US at the IISE Student Regional Conference in Rochester, NY in February 2022. Her paper, Facility Design and Simulation Modeling of a COVID 19 vaccination clinic in the Pittsburgh area, was completed as part of a project with faculty member Dr. Bopaya Bidanda, Ernest Roth Professor of Industrial Engineering and Philip Andreoli (Pitt IE, Class of 2022).

The Cooperative & Experiential Education Division (CEED) of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) named Erin Marshall ’22 as its 2022 CEED Intern Student of the Year. Marshall was nominated for her internship at West Monroe in Chicago, Ill., where she worked with a team to develop and analyze a business continuity plan for a multibillion-dollar utilities company in the event of a cyber-attack.

Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Faculty

Hessam Babaee, assistant professor, is the recipient of the National Institute of Health (NIH) R21 Trailblazer award for his project titled “Enhanced Clinical Diagnosis through Imaging and Modeling: A Machine Learning Data Fusion Framework.” The R21 grant mechanism from the NIH is intended to encourage exploratory/ developmental research by providing support for the early and conceptual stages of project development.

Peyman Givi, Distinguished Professor and James T. MacLeod Professor, received the University of Pittsburgh Provost’s Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring, The award recognizes outstanding mentors who have the greatest impact on students seeking research doctorate degrees. Givi was also elected Fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics at its 16th Pan-American Congress of Applied Mechanics.

The Pitt STRIVE program selected Katherine Hornbostel, assistant professor, to receive the 2021 Outstanding DEI Service Award. This accolade recognizes her efforts to advance diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering.

John Swanson Endowed Professor Scott Mao (retired) was the 2022 recipient of the Metal Physics Award from The Metallurgy and Materials Society of CIM. Since 1977, the Metal Physics Award has been given to deserving researchers to recognize their achievements in fundamental physics of importance to the understanding of metals as materials. The title of Mao’s award-winning paper is “Atomistic processes of deformation in nanocrystals with in-situ high resolution transmission electron microscope.”

Wei Xiong, assistant professor, received a $526,334 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The project is titled “Unraveling Fundamental Mechanisms Governing Grain Refinement in Complex Concentrated Alloys Made by Additive Manufacturing Towards Strong and Ductile Structures” and has a five-year duration.

Students

Asher Hancock ’22 received a Churchill Scholarship funding a year of study at the University of Cambridge in the UK. He is one of 18 awardees this year, and the fifth Pitt student to be honored with the award. Hancock also received a Goldwater Scholarship in 2021. Zachary Egolf received an NSF graduate research fellowship but instead accepted a prestigious Rickover Fellowship in Nuclear Engineering. His advisor is Jeff Vipperman.

Seth Strayer, a second-year PhD student, received a prestigious NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities (NSTGRO) award. The award sponsors U.S. citizen and permanent resident graduate students who show significant potential to contribute to NASA’s goal of creating innovative new space technologies for our Nation’s science, exploration and economic future.

First-year MEMS PhD student Yang-Duan Su is first author on a paper recently named Editor’s Choice by Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI). The article, “Fiber Optic Sensing Technology for Battery Management Systems and Energy Storage Applications,” appeared in the 2021 edition of MDPI open Access Journal Sensors. This is Su’s first publication as a MEMS graduate student.

Steven Tsoukalas, mechanical engineering sophomore, was awarded the Naugle Fellowship in Mechanical Engineering for 2022. The fellowship comes in the form of a one-time payment that will be used to reduce tuition debt.

Lauren Wewer ’22 received the best poster award at the American Society for Metals (ASM) Young Members Night Poster Competition. “Alloy Design by Additive Manufacturing for Power Plants with High Energy Efficiency” showed Wewer’s research results generated from a MASCRO summer research internship she completed last summer on graded alloy additive manufacturing. She outcompeted other students from both Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University in the undergraduate category to win the award.

Sarah Wielgosz ’22 was the 2022 winner of the Marion Alice Nye “Buzz” Barry Scholarship, named in honor of Marion Alice Nye “Buzz” Barry, a licensed commercial pilot, certified flight and ground school instructor, a member of the Ninety-Nine Women Pilots Association, and one of the first women in the aviation industry. The scholarship can be used for tuition or sponsored academic research related to aerospace engineering.

The recently organized Pitt Electric Propulsion student group, a part of Pitt’s Electric Vehicle Engineering Design Team, comprised of mechanical engineering and electrical engineering students took home third place at the Promoting Electric Propulsion (PEP) for small craft competition held in Pohick Bay, VA this past May. This was Pitt’s first year competing, and the third year the competition has taken place. The competition is sponsored by the American Society of Naval Engineers (ASNE). The PEP competition is an educational and competitive program to foster the development of electric watercraft in the United States. Each college team received up to a $7000 technology mini-grant to construct an electric-powered boat that can complete a five-mile race. The competition had manned and unmanned categories, with Pitt participating in the former.