EECS faculty, staff, and students were recently honored at both the TCE Faculty and Staff Awards dinner and the Gonzalez Family Awards banquet.
The EECS faculty and students honored at the Gonzalez Awards banquet were:
The Gonzalez Awards
Computer Engineering
Outstanding Senior: Meghan Brandt
The Smithville, Tennessee native gained internship experience with Texas Instruments and participated in a co-op with NASA Glenn Research Center. Her career goals involve pursuing a master’s degree in mathematics and continuing a PhD program specializing in computer science.
Outstanding Junior: Josh Ward
The Knoxville native will be serving an internship at Cru Headquarters in Orlando, Florida this summer. He plans to use his degree in computer engineering to help others.
Outstanding Sophomore: Neela Barker
The Maryland native is minoring in cybersecurity. Baker served an internship with Intelligenesis LLC, where she worked with AI models, including neural networks and large language models. This summer, she will be working at Northrop Gruman in their Missions Systems sector. Baker wants to pursue a career in secure chip design.
Computer Science
Outstanding Senior: Josephine Rich
Rich has served internships at Acato, Northrop Grumman, and McLauren Aerospace. She’s been recognized in business competitions like Vol Court and the Graves Business Plan events.
Outstanding Junior: Isha Bhandari
The Farragut, Tennessee native is the President-Elect of the Society for Women Engineers and volunteers with Big Brothers, Big Sisters. Bhandari interned with the SULI program at Oak Ridge National Lab, conducting research on software development for Slicer 2. She’s currently interning with the same group, focusing on implementing a new algorithm.
Outstanding Sophomore: Rudra Patel
The Nashville native volunteers with UT’s Hack4Impact to help local nonprofits with software solutions. Patel’s also gained experience at Knoxville Utilities Board, focusing on their outage notification system. This summer, he’ll intern as a cloud engineer at General Electric Vernova in Atlanta, then return to KUB part-time in the fall.
Electrical Engineering
Outstanding Senior: Raymond Luberto
The New Jersey native participated in an internship with Rehrig Pacific Company and Energy Transfer, spots where he was primarily focused on learning about working controls and automation equipment. Luberto will be working full-time for Eastman Chemical Company after graduation.
Outstanding Junior: Christian Harmon
Harmon has a strong drive to excel as an engineer and his passion lies in learning, whether through formal education or life experiences.
Outstanding Sophomore: Emma Laymon
The Franklin, Tennessee native is preparing to study in Spain this summer to complete her Spanish minor. Laymon’s future aspirations involve applying her knowledge in electrical engineering and leveraging her study abroad experiences and future internships to tackle real-world problems.
Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistants
Computer Engineering: MD Saif Hassan
Hassan is a second-year international PhD student from Bangladesh. His research focuses on the application of machine learning and quantum machine learning.
Computer Science: Burcum Eken
Eken is from Turkey. She is a PhD student focusing on cyber-attacks on Lane Detection System. Eken is the co-founder of the Cyber Security Research and Development Group at UT. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree, she was an instructor in a project organized with the CISCO-Habitat to bring refugees into society in Turkey.
Electrical Engineering: Sebastian Martinez
Martinez, originally from Chile, is a third-year PhD student with a focus on power system dynamics under the advisory of Associate Professor Hector Pulgar.
Outstanding Graduate Research Assistants
Computer Engineering: MD Mazharul Islam
Before starting his PhD, Islam worked full-time as a lecturer in several universities in Bangladesh. His research focuses on emerging memory and logic devices for both room temperature and cyrogenic temperatures.
Computer Science: Ashley Babjac
The Texas native is in the final year of her PhD with research interests that involve applications of deep learning and explainable AI for interpretable proteomics. After graduation, she’ll be moving to Germany to complete a postdoctoral fellowship.
Electrical Engineering: Niu Jia
Jia is from Hefei, China. The fourth-year PhD student plans to transition into the industry after graduation and harness her knowledge to turn designs into real products.
Gonzalez Staff Awards
Angie Chance
Dan Morehead
Gonzalez Family Award for Excellence in Teaching
Catherine Schuman
Gonzalez Family Award for Excellence in Research
Hua “Kevin” Bai
The TCE Faculty and Staff Awards
The EECS faculty who won awards at the TCE event were:
Outstanding Service to the College
Mike Berry
Outstanding Contribution to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award
Catherine Schuman
Teaching Fellow Awards
Ahmedullah Aziz
Kevin Bai
Professional Promise in Research Award
Dan Wilson
Research Achievement Award
Fran Li
Translational Research Award
Ahmedullah Aziz
James Plank
Garrett Rose
Catherine Schuman
Dean’s Meritorious Achievement Award
Leon Tolbert
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (865-974-0683, rpotkey@utk.edu)