4/18/2013
Five outstanding Engineering at Illinois graduate students have been selected for the 13th annual Roy J. Carver Fellowships in Engineering. Nominated by their respective departments, Valerie Bauza, Joseph Flanagan, Matthew Gelber, Omkar Lokhande, and Prince Singh were recognized for their achievements and will receive stipends to support their first-year graduate education and research.
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Five outstanding Engineering at Illinois graduate students have been selected for the 13th annual Roy J. Carver Fellowships in Engineering. Nominated by their respective departments, Valerie Bauza, Joseph Flanagan, Matthew Gelber, Omkar Lokhande, and Prince Singh were recognized for their achievements and will receive stipends to support their first-year graduate education and research.
(l to r) Prince Singh, Matthew Gelber, Valerie Bauza, Joseph Flanagan, and Omkar Lokhande
The Carver Fellowships in Engineering were established in 1999 by a gift from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust and are awarded to not only top scholars and researchers but to students who embody to the growing legacy of Roy J. Carver. The 1934 Engineering at Illinois graduate founded the Carver Pump Company which became the world’s largest producer of retread materials and equipment for the transportation industry. The first class of Carver Fellows was named in the fall of 2000.
Valerie Bauza, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Valerie Bauza is a PhD candidate interested in designing more accessible and sustainable sanitation systems through her research with the hope that this work can be used to increase access to sanitation in developing countries.
“I was honored to receive the Carver Fellowship because I felt that it demonstrated my potential to succeed in research and make significant contributions to my field,” Bauza said. “Because of the long commitment that goes into a PhD, it was important to me to be able to explore my research interests a bit during my first year and I’m thankful that the Carver Fellowship has given me the freedom to do this.”
Bauza comes to Illinois after receiving her master’s degree from Stanford University with a concentration in environmental engineering and science. While at Stanford, she worked to develop a community-based water treatment system and perform a controlled trial of it in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She received her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she worked on clean-water projects for Rwanda and Kenya as a member of Engineers Without Borders and then went on to gain three years of professional work experience as a project engineer for a wastewater treatment design firm.
At Illinois, Bauza is part of professor Jeremy Guest’s research group that is developing biotechnologies to increase access to sustainable sanitation in both developing and technologically advanced communities.
Joseph Flanagan, Materials Science and Engineering
“Illinois is one of the best places in the world for materials research, and the Carver Fellowship has given me the flexibility to explore the different facets of science and engineering that I find most interesting,” Joseph Flanagan explained. As a freshman at Purdue, Flanagan was initially drawn to materials science because of its importance to technology development and the world as a whole. His senior design project was focused on transient liquid phase sintering, a relatively new technology for the electronics industry.
His interest in research was sparked by several diverse experiences, including a summer project gathering field data for a USDA Agricultural Research Service rainfall simulation project and several campus research projects ranging from molecular and nano-scale materials studies to global issues in electronic waste. An NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates project added cross-cultural experiences as a professional researcher working with the Georgia Institute of Technology and Imperial College in London.
Today, Flanagan is researching the next generation of electronic materials with Professor Moonsub Shim. His current research interests include synthesis and characterization of semiconductors for solar cells, where materials that excel at absorbing light and splitting charge can be realized. He is also continuing his studies on the role of technology in the environment through the interdisciplinary Energy and Sustainability Engineering program.
Matthew Gelber, Bioengineering
According to one of his advisors, Matthew Gelber seems to know something about everything—from molecular biology, organismal physiology, and nutrition, to the history of science and environmentalism, and, of course, anything related to technology. As a top undergraduate student in general engineering at Illinois, and later as a graduate researcher at the University of Washington, Gelber has continued his pursuit of balance between what he loves to do and what fascinates him intellectually.
“I am grateful for the Carver Foundation’s recognition of my commitment to excellence and to the continued success of Illinois, my alma mater,” Gelber said. “This support has given me independence in pursuing a project which draws on my group’s expertise in instrumentation and image processing but extends it in a new direction.”
He is now working with Professor Rohit Bhargava on automated methods for assembling geometrically complex, multi-material structures, for applications ranging from labs-on-a-chip to vascularized tissue models. By developing software for designing such parts, as well as the hardware to turn the design file into a physical construct, Gelber hopes to streamline the process of experimental design and execution. This will enable collaborators from multiple disciplines to conceive, investigate, and iteratively optimize experimental systems which were previously impractical or impossible to make.
Omkar Lokhande, Mechanical Science and Engineering
“I feel honored to be awarded the Carver fellowship. I view it as recognition of my past efforts and it motivates me to keep on working hard,” remarked Omkar Lokhande, who credits his family and his uncle, a practicing mechanical engineer, for sparking his interest in science and technology from an early age. Ranked in the top one percent in India’s National Standard Examinations in Physics and Chemistry, Lokhande qualified for the Indian Chemistry Olympiad.
As a sophomore at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, he received a research internship at the Heat and Mass Transfer Technology Centre at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain, where he learned to solve computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer problems using finite volume method. A year later, he received another research internship in micro-fluidics that brought him to the National Institute of Nanotechnology at the University of Alberta, Canada. There, he designed a microfluidic device and set up experiments to manipulate protein molecules using dielectrophoresis. The ultimate goal of the research was to manipulate myoglobin to help in early detection of cardiac arrests.
For part of his senior thesis, Lokhande developed computer codes to simulate compressible flows in rib roughened serpentine passages involved in cooling of turbine blades and performed experiments to validate the implementation. Well-traveled and well-prepared for his graduate studies, Lokhande has brought his interest in computation and mathematical rigor involved in research to Illinois where he will be working in the area of analytical and computational combustion.
Prince Singh, Aerospace Engineering
Since childhood, Prince Singh has been fascinated with airplanes and space exploration. As an undergraduate at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, his favorite classes were in control systems, especially for aircraft and spacecraft.
He also shared his skills and interests on several interdisciplinary projects including plans for a NASA nano-satellite, a jet dragster, underwater robotics, an experimental aircraft, and formula one racecar. He earned a master’s degree in applied mathematics at London’s Imperial College at the age of twenty, paving the way for his PhD studies at Illinois where he will apply the use of nonlinear control theory for designing more complex control systems.
“It is a great honor for me to be awarded the Carver Fellowship to pursue my PhD under Professor Sri Namachchivaya at a world renowned engineering department,” Singh said. “I sincerely believe that this opportunity will provide a good foundation for me to delve further into the realms of nonlinear systems, and, in turn, enable me to develop something fruitful at the end of my research endeavor at Illinois.”
As a part of Namachchivaya’s Nonlinear Systems Group, Singh’s current research focuses on escape times from basins of attractions of stable equilibria through Large Deviations Theory, which has practical applications that include the capsizing of ships and detecting failures of power systems. Specifically, he is working to develop schemes that will signal failures of systems in the presence of noise and prevent them.
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Contact: Jonathan Hill, director of advancement, College of Engineering, 217265-6567.
Writer: Chad Thornburg, Engineering Communications Office
If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.