Faculty recognized for teaching, research, community engagement
Levi T. Thompson, Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Delaware, has selected three faculty members to receive Dean’s awards in 2020.
- Sunita Chandrasekaran, assistant professor of computer and information sciences, received the Excellence in Teaching award.
- Earl (Rusty) Lee, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Service and Community Engagement.
- Andreas Malikopoulos, Terri Connor Kelly and John Kelly Career Development Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, received the Outstanding Junior Faculty award.
Sunita Chandrasekaran
Chandrasekaran is an expert in high-performance computing (HPC), computational science, application benchmarking, bioinformatics and more.
At the undergraduate level, Chandrasekaran teaches courses in subjects such as computer architecture and parallel computing. At the graduate level, Chandrasekaran teaches courses in subjects such as high-performance computing for scientific applications, computer systems architecture and will be teaching a data science course.
She also teaches in UD’s Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program, which brings together multidisciplinary teams of undergraduate and graduate students to work on cutting-edge research. Through VIP, Chandrasekaran has mentored students in projects such as accelerating a biophysics code on GPUs recently published in PLOS Computational Biology.
Earl (Rusty) Lee
Rusty is the program coordinator of the Delaware Technology Transfer (T2 ) / Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) Center, which coordinates about 50 training events per year, representing over 15,000 contact hours with state, county and local transportation agency members.
Rusty identifies, prioritizes and arranges training for the Delaware Department of Transportation (DELDOT) and Delaware municipalities and has developed and delivered courses including the Delaware Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, Math Skills for Inspectors (Basic and Advanced) and the DELDOT Project Development Manual. He has also provided oversight and training of many student interns working for local communities in topics including sign and pavement management, American With Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance and small bridge structure inspections.
Rusty has also served UD as Deputy Director and Interim Director of the Honors Program, now the Honors College.
Andreas Malikopoulos
Malikopoulos is recognized for his work in several fields, including analysis, optimization, and control of cyber-physical systems; decentralized stochastic systems; stochastic scheduling and resource allocation; and learning in complex systems. He has made seminal contributions towards making cyber physical systems able to learn how to improve their performance over time while interacting with their environment. He was elected an ASME Fellow for his pioneering contributions to self-learning powertrain control work that changed the perception of how vehicles are optimized today.
He leads the new Sociotechnical Systems Center, a collaborative and interdisciplinary community at the University of Delaware with shared research interests and goals in addressing complex sociotechnical systems challenges. He created a unique testbed, UD’s Scaled Smart City, which includes 35 robotic cars and 10 drones that can replicate real-world traffic scenarios in a small and controlled environment.
Malikopoulos has demonstrated leadership toward enhancing our understanding of the potential benefits of emerging mobility systems. He has organized several international workshops and symposia in which he brought together leaders from government, industry, and academia to discuss what innovations are needed and identify the road for future energy-efficient mobility systems.
In 2019, he received the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Young Researcher Award.