RECIPIENTS WILL BE RECOGNIZED AT THE IEEE EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES BOARD AWARDS EXPERIENCE
TO BE BROADCAST AT 9 A.M. (ET) THURSDAY, 11 NOVEMBER 2021
From left to right above: Dr. Krishnendu Chakrabarty, Dr. Steve E. Watkins, Dr. Hayden Kwok-Hay So, and Dr. Vineetha Menon.
Contact: Nancy Ostin, Director, IEEE-HKN
1 November 2021
PISCATAWAY, NJ – IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu (IEEE-HKN), the honor society of IEEE, is thrilled to announce the recipients of the 2021 IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu Awards and Recognition program.
Dr. Krishnendu Chakrabarty, the John Cocke Distinguished Professor and Department Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University was named the recipient of IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu’s highest honor, IEEE-HKN Asad M. Madni Outstanding Technical Achievement and Excellence Award, for 2021. He was recognized “for impactful research contributions in micro-fluidic biochips, technology transfer, and student mentoring.”
Dr. Steve E. Watkins, 2018 IEEE-HKN President and Interim Chair & Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, Missouri University of Science & Technology, has received the 2021 IEEE-HKN Distinguished Service Award “for a career of outstanding contributions and sustained service to IEEE-HKN.”
Dr. Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Hong Kong, is the recipient of the 2021 C. Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award “for innovation and dedication in improving undergraduate engineering education through project-led learning experience.”
Dr. Vineetha Menon, Assistant Professor, University of Alabama in Huntsville, received the Outstanding Young Professional Award “for exemplary contributions that uphold the core values of IEEE-HKN: through scholarship in multidisciplinary Big Data applications research, with impactful leadership, mentoring, and empowerment of women and minorities in STEM.”
All four accepted their awards at IEEE-HKN’s Awards and Recognition Ceremony held 9 October 2021 and also will be recognized at the IEEE Educational Activities Board Awards Experience to be broadcast at 9 a.m. (ET) Thursday, 11 November 2021.
The 2021 IEEE-HKN Awards program was extremely competitive, having received a total of 70 nominations. In fact, the nominees for the Outstanding Young Professional Award were so strong that the subcommittee also named two honorable mentions for the award, the first honorable mentions ever conferred for this award. The honorable mentions are Dr. Amy K. Jones, Engineering Supervisor – Operator Station Module and Systems for John Deere, Construction and Forestry Division; and Dr. Achuta, Assistant Professor, UCLA Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Madni Award winner Dr. Chakrabarty has a sustained record of research contributions, student mentoring, and exemplary technical leadership. He was elevated to the IEEE Fellow for contributions to design-for-test (DfT) of core-based SOCs. Subsequently, he pioneered the design of microfluidic biochips, including first optimization methods to manipulate nanoliter droplets. He was elevated to ACM Fellow and AAAS Fellow for these breakthroughs.
According to his nominator, Dr. Chakrabarty is recognized as a thought leader in bridging experimental microfluidics and biochemistry with algorithms and chip design. He is acclaimed as the “father” of design optimization for microfluidic biochips, according to his nomination.
Dr. Watkins, the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award, has been involved with Eta Kappa Nu and later IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu throughout his professional life. He was inducted as an undergraduate in 1982 through the Gamma Theta Chapter at Missouri S&T (then University of Missouri-Rolla), and was selected as HKN’s Alton B. Zerby Outstanding Student for 1983. He is the longest-serving faculty advisor in the Gamma Theta Chapter’s 69-year history.
Dr. Watkins was IEEE-HKN President in 2018, and currently serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of its flagship publication THE BRIDGE, for which he spearheaded the transition from print to electronic format. THE BRIDGE has won eight consecutive Apex Awards of Excellence under his supervision.
Outstanding Teaching Award recipient, Dr. So, contributed immensely to engineering curriculum design at the University of Hong Kong through his project-led learning pedagogy, according to his nomination. He redesigned the introduction to electrical & electronic engineering course for all first year engineering students at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). The new course emphasized heavily the design thinking processing.
Outstanding Young Professional award recipient, Dr. Menon strives to constantly expand the horizons of Big Data analytics research at the University of Alabama in Hunstville through impactful multidisciplinary applications. Dr. Menon and her Big Data analytics lab collaborated with Dr. Jerome Baudry (UAH), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and others on a COVID-19 drug discovery project. This collaborative project garnered international attention for its use of AI techniques to accelerate the drug discovery process using supercomputers for rapid healthcare response.
Click here for more information on the IEEE-HKN Awards Program.
IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu (IEEE-HKN) is the honor society of IEEE. It consists of more than 200,000 professionals and university students worldwide in the IEEE fields of interest.
