Associate Professors Krishna Garikipati and Steve Skerlos are the recipients of the 2009 ME Department Achievement Awards.
Awards will be presented at the Departmental Spring Banquet in May and at this year’s College of Engineering Faculty Honors Dinner Dance on Saturday, March 28.
Krishna Garikipati is an eminent scholar and a leading researcher in the field of computational physics. He has made significant contributions to the study of biological growth and remodeling, and on the mechanics of biological tissue. He is currently leading an effort to forge a unified view of biological growth and remodeling – publishing invited reviews and perspective papers on this topic in leading mechanics journals. He is an organizer of a high profile symposium on Cellular, Molecular and Tissue Mechanics under the auspices of the International Union for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and is now editing a peer-reviewed book of proceedings of this meeting. Professor Garikipati has been giving keynote lectures at academic meetings, and has been invited to speak at numerous colloquia at universities, national laboratories and institutes in the US and abroad, such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UC-Berkeley. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Applied Mechanics, and of Communications in Numerical Methods in Engineering. The impact of Garikipati’s’s research is evidenced by the high citations of his work, with the highest over 133. He is also an outstanding teacher with very high teaching evaluation scores.
In addition, Garikipati is the recipient of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2004, for his “innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology, and for exceptional potential to shape the future through intellectual and inspired leadership.” He has also received the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, and a Certificate of Congressional Recognition signed for “outstanding achievement in engineering and significant contributions to the Department of Energy’s national security mission.”
Since joining the Mechanical Engineering faculty in 2000, Steve Skerlos has made a significant impact in all aspects of academia (teaching, research and service). He has consistently sustained top teaching evaluations within the department. In addition, he has been a leader in collaborating and introducing interdisciplinary educational programs including: the Dual Master Degree in Sustainable Systems with the School of Natural Resources (first of its kind in the country), undergraduate minor in Multidisciplinary Design, and the Design Science PhD program. He has established one of the nation’s top laboratories in sustainability, the Environmental and Sustainable Technologies (EAST) laboratory, which is recognized for state of the art research and the successful transition to industry. One example includes creation of a bio-sensor and a complementary molecular probe that together can rapidly detect hazardous microbial populations which was spun-off into Accuri Cytometers, a company now employing over 50 people in Ann Arbor and across the country.
Skerlos is sought as an expert on national policy on sustainability and is the co-director of a $2M NSF Center to develop software tools for policy makers to evaluate the impact of their decisions and has recently received one of the largest grants from the Phoenix institute in this area. He has a strong publication record and is the holder of several patents. He has been the recipient of several prestigious and highly competitive national awards (NSF CAREER Award, SAE Ralph Teetor Award, SME Kuo K. Wang Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award) and College of Engineering awards (the Education Excellence Award, 1938E Award, and the Joel and Alice Spira Outstanding Teaching Award).
