Sabit Adanur, mechanical engineering professor, was awarded a grant from the State of Alabama ADECA-ARDEF program for a project titled “Design, Fabrication and Testing of Novel Medical Facemasks to Prevent COVID-19.”

Mark Barnett, professor of civil and environmental engineering, is a co-principal investigator of a four-year, $5 million Alabama Black Belt Rural Wastewater Pilot Project grant from the United States Department of Agriculture.

David Bevly, the Bill and Lana McNair Distinguished Professor of mechanical engineering, and Scott Martin, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, were awarded a total of $525,000 from IS4S to support the research in GPS-denied navigation taking place in the GPS and Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory. Additionally, Bevly was awarded a $300,000 grant from IS4S to study intelligent emergency stop mechanics for autonomous vehicles, and Martin was awarded two grants totaling $350,000 from IS4S to study methods of navigation that will overcome jamming or spoofing attempts.

Three faculty from the Department of Aerospace Engineering, assistant professors Imon Chakraborty and Ehsan Taheri, and Roy Hartfield, the Walt and Virginia Woltosz Professor, recently concluded a Phase I STTR project funded by the United States Air Force Agility Prime program titled “Electric Extended Range Airship with Modular Payload.” The $150,000 Phase I project was a collaboration between Auburn University, Research in Flight and Skyborne Technology, an airship manufacturer based in Wewahitchka, Florida.

Edward Davis, associate professor of materials engineering, was awarded a 3-year $651,510 grant from the Office of Naval Research titled “Promoting DoN STEM careers via STEM educational activities” that focuses on the improvement of STEM education in 9-12 grades with particular focus on Naval STEM needs.

David Elton, emeritus professor of civil and environmental engineering, has coauthored a textbook titled “Fundamentals of Ground Improvement Engineering” with Taylor & Francis, London.

Xiaowen Gong, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, was awarded $220,000 from the National Science Foundation for his study “Quality-Aware Distributed Computation for Wireless Federated Learning: Channel-Aware User Selection, Mini-Batch Size Adaptation, and Scheduling.”

Gregory Harris, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering, and Gregory Purdy, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering, were awarded $1.85 million to begin the second year of the Systems Engineering Technology Program Development and Application project from the Department of Defense’s Office of Industrial Policy through its Industrial Base Analysis and Systainment Program.

Peng Li, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, is the recipient of a 2021 Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Award, given by Oak Ridge Associated Universities to 35 junior faculty nationally. He is the co-principal investigator of a $523,200 National Science Foundation award titled “Probing novel phases of matter in van der Waals magnet Fe5-xGeTe2” and is the U.S. principal investigator of a $291,159 international joint award by U.S. Air Force Science Lab Asian Office of Aerospace R&D and National Research Foundation of South Korea for the project “Engineering Exceptional Points in All[1]On-Chip Organic-Inorganic[1]Layered Hybrid Quantum Devices.”

Elizabeth Lipke, the Mary and John H. Sanders Professor of chemical engineering, and Selen Cremaschi, the Redd Endowed Eminent Scholar Chair Professor of chemical engineering, are the lead investigators on a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant for their project titled “Directing and Controlling Cardiac Differentiation Through Cellular and Microenvironmental Manipulation and Application of Machine-Learning.”

Jia (Peter) Liu, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering, and Nima Shamsaei, Philpott-WestPoint Stevens Distinguished Professor of mechanical engineering, received a $498,762 National Science Foundation grant for research titled “Federated Deep Learning for Future Ubiquitous Distributed Additive Manufacturing” with George Mason University.

Shiwen Mao, the Earle C. Williams Eminent Scholar and professor of electrical and computer engineering, was awarded $320,000 from the National Science Foundation for his work titled “Data Augmentation and Adaptive Learning for Next Generation Wireless Spectrum Systems” and is serving as the general chair of the 41st IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2022) in London, May 2022.

Daniela Marghitu, professor of computer science and software engineering, has been appointed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to its Committee on the Future of NSF’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). She is also a co-investigator of a $10 million NSF project to lead a national research effort to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics education among students with disabilities.

Konstantinos Mykoniatis, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering, and two of his graduate students received a Best Paper Award at the 33rd European Modeling and Simulation Symposium for the paper “Analyzing the Impact of Vaccination on COVID-19 Spread and Hospitalizations: A Multi-Paradigm Simulation Modeling Approach.”

Anton Schindler, the Mountain Spirit Professor of civil and environmental engineering, was elected to become a member of the Academy of Distinguished Alumni of the Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin. The Academy of Distinguished Alumni recognizes the department’s graduates that have made outstanding contributions as engineer practitioner, leader, academic, and/or researcher.

Kyle Schulze, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, recently received $216,634 from the National Science Foundation to study the mechanics and lubrication of human epithelial cells with his project “In Vitro Epithelial Lubrication: Collective Motion, Mechanics, and Fluid Transport.”

Computer science and software engineering professors Drew Springall, Dean Hendrix and Daniel Tauritz have been awarded a $299,941 National Science Foundation grant for their project “Transformative Educational Approaches to Meld Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity Mindsets,” which seeks to explore educational approaches to combine the AI and security worlds.

Alice Smith, the Joe W. Forehand/Accenture Professor of industrial and systems engineering, was named a fellow of INFORMS and also delivered keynote addresses at six virtual conferences: Troy University Annual Research and Scholarship Conference (keynote, April 2021); IEEE Hyderabad Section (IEEE CIS Distinguished Lecture, May 2021); 6th IEEE Symposium on Analytics and Risk (keynote, July 2021); University of Hong Kong System Analytics Global Leaders Seminar (keynote, August 2021); International Symposium for Production Research (keynote, October 2021); and XV Brazillian Congress on Computational Intelligence (keynote, October 2021).

Jakita Thomas, the Philpott-WestPoint Stevens Associate Professor in computer science and software engineering, was awarded a $160,235 grant from the National Science Foundation for her work titled “Experiencing The Matrix of Power Dynamics for Undergraduate and Graduate Black Women in Computing to Understand their Intersectional Experiences.”

Hareesh Tippur, the McWane Endowed Chair Professor of mechanical engineering, and Xinyu Zhang, professor of chemical engineering, were awarded a $489,155 grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled “Material Processing and Mechanical Behavior of High-Performance Cellulose Nanopaper made from Cellulose Nanofibers.” The project aims to create green alternatives to traditional fossil fuel derived polymers and polymer composites.

A team of researchers from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering was awarded a Best Paper Award from the journal, Ergonomics. The paper titled “Job rotation and work[1]related musculoskeletal disorders: a fatigue-failure perspective” was co-authored by associate professors Aleksandr Vinel and Mark Schall; Sean Gallagher, the Hal N. and Peggy S. Pennington Professor; and Richard Sesek, the Tim Cook Associate Professor.

The Department of Chemical Engineering has been awarded a new 3-year GAANN program from the Department of Education for a total amount of $607,000 in federal funds. The Project Director is Jin Wang, the Walt and Virginia Woltosz Endowed Professor, with co-PIs Bob Ashurst, Selen Cremaschi, Mario Eden, Peter He, Chris Kieslich and Robert Pantazes.