College Research Awards
The William States Lee College of Engineering’s faculty research awards were created to acknowledge success in conducting impactful, cutting-edge research and all it entails: leadership and mentorship, scholarly dissemination and extramurally-funded research.
Full-time faculty, including research faculty, with a minimum of three years of employment within the W.S. Lee College of Engineering are eligible for this category. The candidates must demonstrate early research success which shows promise for future impact on their field of study.
2025 Recipient: Youxing Chen
Chen, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and engineering science, researches materials’ response under extreme environments and explores the fundamental relationship between materials structure and property across multiple length scales, from atomic to macroscopic scale. He has received more than $1 million in external funding as a PI and has written 73 peer-reviewed articles. He has a consistent track record of graduate and undergraduate student engagement, and is involved in the professional societies TMS and JOM.
2025 Recipient: Dipankar Maity
Maity, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, researches control theory, multi-agent-systems, robotics and Cyber-Physical-Systems. He has participated in the Army Research Lab (ARL), Coastal Studies Institute, and the STTR funding portfolio. He currently advises four PhD students, two master’s students and one undergraduate. He has written more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and has given invited talks at the 2024 IEEE American Control Conference, the University of Southern California and The Ohio State University.
Previous Recipients
2024: Amir Ghasemi
2023: Kosta Falaggis
2022: Jun Xu
All full-time faculty, including research faculty, who have been employed by the W.S. Lee College of Engineering for five years are eligible. Applications can come from an individual or a team. Candidates for this award must demonstrate their exceptional research activity during the time-defined period.
2025 Recipient: Praveen Ramaprabhu
Ramaprabhu, professor of mechanical engineering and engineering science, researches buoyancy-driven flows, turbulence, shock-turbulence interactions, multiphase flows, computational fluid dynamics and high-performance computing. He has received funding from multiple NSF awards and NC Digital Engineering, and participated in Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programs. He is advising six doctoral students and one master’s student. This year, he had six journal publications and five conference papers spanning both technical and educational topics. He is actively involved in the Division of Fluid Dynamics conference and also developed IMPACT: a massively parallel, shock physics code for the simulation of multimaterial shocked flow.
Previous Recipients
2024: Hamed Tabkhi
2022: Badrul Chowdhury
Full-time faculty at the rank of associate professor or higher, with a minimum of five years of employment within the W.S. Lee College of Engineering, are eligible for this recognition. Candidates must demonstrate substantial creativity and scholarship in her/his field of expertise. Level of excellence will be evidenced by publication, high degree of citation, external funding and recognition among peers.
Previous Recipients
2024: Tiefu Zhao
2023: Tara Cavalline, Robert Cox, Hamed Tabkhi
Recipients are recognized for a level of excellence very clearly superior to that expected of a faculty member in the field.
2025 Recipient: Tao Hong
Hong, Duke Energy Distinguished Professor, NCEMC Faculty Fellow, and Graduate and Research Director for industrial and systems engineering, is a Co-PI on a large NC Policy grant. His research, which has been supported continuously over the past several years by North Carolina Electric Cooperatives and Duke Energy, includes energy forecasting, energy trading, power systems operations and planning, renewable integration, risk management, retail forecasting, revenue optimization and forecasting in healthcare, transportation and sports. He has had more than 20 papers published in since 2022. In the past three years, he has advised two doctoral students and currently advises a post-doctoral student and two master’s students. He has received numerous keynote speaking invites, including the PNUCC Load Forecasting Workshop in 2024.