Pomona's Outstanding Faculty
Awards
Chemical and Materials Engineering Professor Earns Major Navy Fellowship
Vilupanur Ravi, Ph.D., professor and former chair of the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, was one of only six professors selected for the U.S. Navy’s inaugural Distinguished Fellows Program.
The program provides funding for Ravi to commit to his research full-time for the next three years. Additional funding allows for the purchase of lab equipment and stipends for student research assistants. With the fellowship valued at over $1.2 million, this is a substantial commitment with a commensurate expectation from the Navy.
“It was a tremendous piece of good news delivered all at once! It took some time to process this,” says Ravi. His research will center around better understanding the role of calcium oxide sulfate in corroding gas turbine engines. Vehicles like aircrafts and ships use this type of engine and corrosion is a common foe in both the air and sea. If corrosion runs amuck, engines fail. The results could be catastrophic, including loss of life.
Furthermore, Ravi is the only professor among the inaugural class of fellows from a university not categorized as a high research activity institution, speaking to the significant and compelling value of his research. His aims are high—he hopes this is not just three productive years of research, but a lasting partnership to help Cal Poly Pomona establish a stronger and sustainable research culture.
“I’m overjoyed by this opportunity. My students and I will work with cutting-edge, world-class universities and research and development personnel from industry leaders across the country,” Ravi says.
Aerospace Professor Earns Cal State University Award
An educator for 30 years with a lifelong love for all things flight and space, Don Edberg, Ph.D., aerospace engineering professor, earned the 2022 Wang Family Excellence Award for Outstanding Teaching Faculty.
Edberg is one of just five recipients selected from across all of the 23 campuses of the California State University system.
As an awardee, Edberg receives a $20,000 cash prize.
“It’s hard to comprehend winning this award over the entire CSU system, which has thousands of great instructors,” Edberg says. “I am very honored to be recognized and humbled at the same time.”
Edberg has taught in Cal Poly Pomona’s aerospace engineering department for 20 years. In this long and fruitful tenure, he has advised over 500 students across 120 design teams in aircraft, spacecraft, and launch vehicles.
“There are professors that become faint memories while others are forever engrained in our memories, guiding us with their knowledge and wisdom,” says Miguel Maya (’13, aerospace engineering), propulsion development engineer at Virgin Orbit. “Dr. Donald Edberg is the epitome for how a professor’s teachings should guide students not only in the present, but also in the future.”
Mechanical Engineering Professor Wins National Teaching Award
Paul Nissenson, Ph.D., professor and associate chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, won the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) 2022 National Teaching Award.
Nissenson was selected among a national pool of nominees for his ongoing dedication to both his students and aspiring engineers across the world. In the classroom, Nissenson has dramatically reduced failure rates in mechanical engineering bottleneck courses—classes where student demand exceeds capacity—from 34 percent to 11 percent.
He’s also dedicated a significant portion of his career to democratizing engineering education via digital efforts. He launched the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) at Cal Poly Pomona, an online course on technical subjects he provided to thousands of students at no cost. Further, Nissenson’s a lead in managing the department’s YouTube channel, CPPMechEngTutorials, an indispensable repository of lectures and educational videos on a variety of mechanical engineering subjects for anyone in the world. The channel has over 105,000 subscribers, 10 million video views and 1 million hours of viewing time.
Tasked with planning, designing, fabricating, and constructing a one-tenth model steel bridge, the civil engineering student team landed first in stiffness and structural efficiency. This marks the first time the team came out on top in these categories, and the second year in a row to land in the top five among a competitive group of over 30 universities.
Industrial and Manufacturing Chair Earns Teaching Award
Shokoufeh Mirzaei, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, earned the Teaching Excellence Award from the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers’ Operations Research Division.
Some of her notable efforts include optimizing learning outcomes in courses by combining in-person lectures with supplemental online videos. The former was utilized as an open lecture to field questions and explore areas of the course that students naturally had inquiries for, while the online videos served as a structured instruction on the course. Viewers around the world, including the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Egypt, have watched Mirzaei’s videos.
She’s also authored a multimedia, non-traditional textbook, offering students greater depth on the subject of operation research at a more affordable price.
Engineering Faculty Earn Two of Three Provost’s Awards
The annual Cal Poly Pomona Provost’s awards saw two of its three categories earned by engineering faculty—Wen Cheng, Ph.D., civil engineering professor, who earned the Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Activities award, and Phyllis Nelson, Ph.D., electrical and computer engineering professor, who earned the Excellence in Service award.
Cheng’s research is focused on highway safety, advanced traffic operation strategies, statistical modeling, and deep machine learning in transportation. He serves as an editorial board member for multiple journals and has been either the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on projects. Cheng’s earned over $3 million in research grants, much of which was focused on laboratory upgrades. He is also the author of a textbook on highway safety, “Highway Geometric Design: Application of Design Standards in InRoads,” and has published more than 100 peer reviewed journal papers and conference proceedings in collaboration with his students and colleagues. In 2020, Cheng earned the Provost’s award for Excellence in Teaching.
Nelson has served as vice chair and then chair of the Academic Senate, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and co-director of the Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Materials Design. She also served on the veteran success committee, numerous search committees, and was a member of the Police Advisory Taskforce, the Cal Poly Pomona Foundation Board of Directors, and the Inclusive Excellence Council Executive Board. She is currently faculty director of Data Analytics. Nelson has been a member of the Mt. Baldy Volunteer Fire Department since 1999, first as a firefighter and now as a dispatcher and secretary of the board of directors.
Chemical and Materials Engineering Associate Professor Recognized as Outstanding Advisor
Jonathan Puthoff, Ph.D., chemical and materials engineering associate professor, earned this year’s Outstanding Faculty Advisor award. Puthoff is just one of eight faculty to receive the annual award from Cal Poly Pomona. Among his efforts, Puthoff redesigned the department’s advising forms to better visualize the path to graduation for students and was central to advising efforts during semester conversion.
Grants and Scholarly Impacts
A $344,995 grant awarded to associate professors Nolan Tsuchiya, Ph.D. and Navid Nakhjiri, Ph.D., from mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering respectively, funds a research studio consisting of state-of-the-art hardware and industry-standard software. Awarded by the Department of Defense and the U.S. Army Contracting Command, the grant also offers faculty and graduate students new opportunities to collaborate and explore ideas related to autonomous vehicle design, robotics, and control systems as they work on a purpose-built, top-end educational experimentation platform.
A $122,895 grant from A.I. Innovations N.V., enables Assistant Professor Simeng Li, Ph.D., from civil engineering to work on the development of superabsorbent polymers that capture and store water from moist air. When applied to agricultural soils, these polymers have the potential to reduce water use and mitigate environmental contamination. Li’s research also includes financial support and career development support for one graduate and one undergraduate student research assistant.
Civil engineering professor Wen Cheng, Ph.D. aims to reduce roadway fatalities and injuries for vehicle drivers and pedestrians and bicyclists in California with help from a $275,000 grant from the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The grant enables interdisciplinary work done by both civil engineering and computer science students for the application of computer vision and sophisticated statistical models for traffic safety.
Underrepresented students in engineering and agriculture will get to enhance their research skills in feed manufacturing technology with help from the Department of Agriculture. Mechanical engineering professor Kevin Anderson, Ph.D., working together with Ondieki Gekara, Ph.D., from the College of Agriculture, will use $150,000 in grant funds to purchase new equipment in the feed mill facility at Cal Poly Pomona. Students and faculty will manufacture their own livestock feed for beef, pork, poultry, and more. Engineering students will utilize the design and layout of the new feed mill facility as a final design for an electromechanical-oriented project.
Zahra Sotoudeh, Ph.D., aerospace engineering associate professor, is conducting research using a new theoretical framework for understanding statistical energy analysis. Made possible with a $199,801 grant from the National Science Foundation, her work seeks to overcome the limitations of traditional statistical energy analysis to better measure high-frequency vibrations, like the kinds produced by aircraft. For example, her work may help protect sensitive sensors of air vehicles from structural vibrations caused by engines, turbines, turbulence, and so on. A portion of the grant will also fund stipends for students researchers.
Further, the associate professor’s part of the U.S. Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship. With a graduate student accompanying Sotoudeh, her second consecutive fellowship has her working on creating a computationally efficient and accurate numerical model for understanding gust response of air vehicles in small Reynolds numbers, such as micro air vehicles (MAVs).
Mohamed Aly, Ph.D., electrical and computer engineering assistant professor, was awarded the U.S. Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship for the fourth consecutive year. This year, he brought his graduate student Melvin Relf to investigate the post-quantum crypto security for medical devices. They are in the process of producing the first continuous glucose meter that uses post-quantum crypto for securing the streaming to intelligent devices, which can be used for securing insulin pump communications.
A $116,405 grant from the Steel Founders’ Society of America funds a study from industrial engineering professor Victor Okhuysen, Ph.D. He’ll be investigating selected steel properties and collecting data about the casting process with the ultimate aim to improve the properties of corrosion-resistant steel alloys to extend the life of equipment in chemical processing environments such as refineries. Another aspect of the research is to obtain data to better protect material properties before making product to ensure the anticipated performance will be met.