Engineering faculty and grad student honored for outstanding achievements

 

POSTED ON May 20, 2021

 

The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) has announced that Oprah Winfrey will be the key graduation speaker for the online  Commencement ceremony on June 12. According to UCSB, the day will also be marked with virtual or small in-person celebrations arranged by schools, academic divisions, and departments, as allowed by public health orders.

Recently, UCSB’s College of Engineering announced that three faculty and one graduate student have been honored for their achievements by the Academic Senate. Each year faculty members and graduate students are recognized for excellence in teaching and mentorship.

According to the engineering school, Frank Zok of the materials department and Timothy Sherwood from the Department of Computer Science received the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award for the 2020-21 academic year. The Academic Senate established the annual award in 2006 to encourage and reward faculty whose mentoring is considered exemplary.

“Because this award is the result of my former students writing in support of what I do here, it is just so incredibly special, and I am honored,” Sherwood said in a statement.

Since joining UCSB’s faculty, Sherwood has served as an advisor for twenty-six Ph.D. and master’s students and sat on review committees for seventy more. His graduate students have earned best paper awards at conferences and have gone on to enjoy careers as assistant professors, executives, and software engineers at major tech companies.

Sherwood’s honors include the Association for Computing Machinery’s Maurice Wilkes Award for outstanding contributions to computer architecture, and the Academic Senate’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Zok, a distinguished professor of materials, has served as principal advisor to thirty students, nine of whom are currently pursuing doctorate degrees. He has co-advised fourteen students and mentored twenty-three postdoctoral researchers during his tenure at UCSB, which spans more than thirty years.

“My graduate students are like family,” Zok told UCSB. “I get to adopt bright, enthusiastic young adults for about five years, mold them and guide them the best I can, and watch them mature — professionally, intellectually, and emotionally.”

Zok received the 2020 Nadai Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for “advancing the understanding of the design and performance of structural materials, including ceramic and metal composites as well as lattice materials, through the development of novel test protocols, theoretical and computational models, and combined experimental/modeling techniques.”

Yogananda Isukapalli, an associate teaching professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department,  was selected by graduating seniors as the Computer Engineering Faculty of the Year in 2018-19, and 2019-20. He received the Academic Senate’s 2020-21 Distinguished Teaching Award for demonstrating excellence in teaching and contributing to the teaching mission of the university.

The Academic Senate also selected Shabnam Larimian, a Ph.D. candidate of electrical and computer engineering, to receive the 2020-21 Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.

“As a teaching assistant, the pandemic made me think about how we can remotely provide students with an in-person experience,” said Larimian. “For example, I tried to provide students with a high-quality learning experience from home by providing much more detailed instructions during a lab experiment to eliminate any questions a student may have.”

She has accepted a position at Uber as a software engineer, but Larimian plans to apply for faculty positions at universities in the near future.

College of Engineering award winners left to right, Shabnam Larimian, Yogananda Isukapalli, Timothy Sherwood, Frank Zok  featured in Recognizing Excellence

Main photo by Ryosuke Yagi –  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39936457