Symone Alexander, Symone Alexander, assistant professor of chemical engineering, received a Chemluminary Award at the American Chemical Society Fall 2025 meeting for the PoWER conference, which brought together students, faculty and industry professionals to hear from women who are technical leaders and innovators in the field of polymer science and engineering.
Robert Barnes, Robert Barnes, the Arthur H. Feagin Chair Professor of civil and environmental engineering, has been appointed to six-year terms on two national committees that draft public policy for the concrete industry: ACI Committee 318, Structural Concrete Building Code, and Joint ACI-PCI 319, Precast Structural Concrete Code.
Bryan Beckingham, Bryan Beckingham, the Uthlaut Family Professor of chemical engineering, and his students were featured on the cover of the European Polymer Journal for their paper titled “Anion exchange membranes based on (3-acrylamidopropyl) trimethylammonium chloride and phenyl acrylate: Impact of crosslinker and crosslinker content on physiochemical properties and transport behavior of acetate and formate.”.
David Bevly, David Bevly, the McNair Distinguished Professor of mechanical engineering and director of the GPS and Vehicle Dynamics Lab, is leading more than $400,000 in collaborative research with IS4S to advance work in positioning, navigation and timing systems and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS).
Imon Chakraborty, Imon Chakraborty, associate professor of aerospace engineering and director of the Vehicle Systems, Dynamics, and Design Lab, was named the Walt and Virginia Woltosz Endowed Professor in July 2025. He also received a NASA STTR Phase I contract with Design, Analysis and Research Corporation for “Simulation and Flight-Testing of Pitch & RPM Thrust Control for eVTOL Aircraft,” providing $74,976 in funding to Auburn. In addition, Chakraborty’s lab won a GoAERO U.S. University Innovation Award, supported by NASA, for Stage 1 of the GoAero competition.
Lorenzo Cremaschi, Lorenzo Cremaschi, the Henry Burt Jr. Professor of mechanical engineering and director of undergraduate research, was elected president of the American Society of Thermal and Fluids Engineers on July 1. On Aug. 1, he was also named editor of the International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer journal. In spring 2025, Cremaschi was awarded an international patent in China for the Electrospray Vortical Flow Exchanger.
Gregory Harris, The Interdisciplinary Center for Advanced Manufacturing Systems received an additional $3.46 million to continue its work on the Manufacturing–Model Based Systems Engineering program, funded by the U.S. Army and the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment Program. Greg Harris, chair of industrial and systems engineering, serves as principal investigator, with co-PIs Edward Huang, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering, Greg Purdy, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering, and Lewis Payton, professor of industrial and systems engineering.
Edward Huang, Edward Huang, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering, has been named editor-in-chief of Advanced Engineering Informatics, a Q1 Elsevier journal focusing on data-driven and AI-enabled research across engineering disciplines such as manufacturing, robotics, systems, aerospace, civil and digital twins.
Zhihua Jiang, Zhihua Jiang, director of the Alabama Center for Paper and Bioresource Engineering, received the inaugural Research Award for Excellence for the Department of Chemical Engineering in the senior faculty category.
Scott Martin, Scott Martin, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of the GPS and Vehicle Dynamics Lab, is serving as co-PI on more than $400,000 in collaborative research with IS4S to develop advanced Global Navigation Satellite Systems and positioning, navigation and timing technologies.
Shiwen Mao, Shiwen Mao, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center, was appointed IEEE Communications Society Director of Magazines for 2026–27. His paper, “Generative AI-empowered RFID sensing for 3D human pose augmentation and completion,” published in the February 2025 issue of IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society, was named one of the Top 5 Most Popular Generative AI Papers of 2025. Another paper, “Adaptive power control for dense RFID networks,” appeared as the cover article in the June 2025 issue of Journal of Communications and Information Networks.
Akond Rahman, Akond Rahman, assistant professor of computer science and software engineering, was invited to deliver a keynote address at a co-located event of the 2025 International Conference on Software Engineering, one of the field’s most prestigious research venues. His talk focused on configuration-related security vulnerabilities and the importance of securing configuration scripts for resilient modern computing infrastructure. In September 2025, Rahman received the department’s Research Award for Excellence (Junior Faculty) from the college in recognition of his research accomplishments in publications and external funding.
Aleksandr Vinel, Aleksandr Vinel, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering, served as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Bilkent University in Turkey during the spring 2025 semester. The appointment concluded in June 2025.
Jin Wang, Walt and Virginia Woltosz Professor of chemical engineering, and Peter He, George E. and Dorothy Stafford Uthlaut Professor of chemical engineering, are co-PIs of a new one-year grant supported by Stiftelsen EQT Foundation titled “High performance methanotroph-based bioreactor for methane concentrations 10–1000 ppm.”.
Yang Zhou, Yang Zhou, associate professor of computer science and software engineering, won the Best Paper Award at the 2025 ACM International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing, one of the world’s leading computer science conferences.
