The Swanson School's Rising Stars
ASME recognizes four Pitt faculty as rising stars of research
Above from left: Amir Alavi, Qihan Liu, Ioannis Zervantonakis, and Xiayun Zhao.
Four faculty from the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering were honored last month with the ASME Rising Star in Mechanical Engineering Award, which recognizes early career researchers who have received prestigious national awards including the National Science Foundation's CAREER award.
The recipients include:
- Amir Alavi, Associate Professor and B.P. America Faculty Fellow, Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Mechanical Metamaterial Electronics: Theory, Design and Applications.”
- Qihan Liu, Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. “Robust, Reversible, and Stimuli-Responsive Thermodynamic Adhesion in Hydrogels.”
- Ioannis Zervantonakis, Assistant Professor and William Kepler Whiteford Faculty Fellow, Bioengineering. “Illuminating the Effects of Hypoxia on Macrophage-Epithelial Crosstalk in Engineered 3D Environments.”
- Xiayun Zhao, Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. “Toward RIPEST Photopolymer Additive Manufacturing (PAM): A Cyber-Physical System of Novel Dual-wavelength Photoinhibition aided PAM.”
Since 2016, 27 of Swanson School faculty have received CAREER awards. The Rising Stars Awards were presented at the International Mechanical Engineering Celebration and Showcase, a reception that included a poster session where researchers presented their work. The celebration was part of the International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition.
“We are incredibly proud of our young faculty and their accomplishments in winning these significant awards at the beginning of their research careers,” noted David Vorp, senior associate dean for research and facilities. “External validation by historic associations like ASME testify to an academic's early trajectory and I congratulate them on this honor.”
###
ASME is a not-for-profit membership organization that enables collaboration, knowledge sharing, career enrichment, and skills development across all engineering disciplines, toward a goal of helping the global engineering community develop solutions to benefit lives and livelihoods. Founded in 1880 by a small group of leading industrialists, ASME has grown through the decades to include more than 85,000 members in 135 countries.
For more than 100 years, ASME has successfully enhanced performance and safety worldwide through its renowned codes and standards, conformity assessment programs, training courses, and journals.
ASME also produces nearly 40 international conferences. These industry-leading events feature advanced research and technical content spanning a range of industries impacted by mechanical engineering, including energy production, energy sources, advanced manufacturing, and engineering sciences.