Contact: Nancy Ostin, Director, IEEE-HKN
10 October 2022
PISCATAWAY, NJ – IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu (IEEE-HKN), the honor society of IEEE, is thrilled to announce the recipients of the 2022 IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu Awards and Recognition program.
Dr. Albert Pisano, Dean of Engineering, Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego was named the recipient of IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu’s highest honor, IEEE-HKN Asad M. Madni Outstanding Technical Achievement and Excellence Award for 2022. He was recognized “for outstanding technical achievements and seminal contributions that promote engineering to broader communities for the benefit of society.” Dr. Pisano was inducted into University of California San Diego’s Kappa Psi Chapter of IEEE-HKN.
Dr. Karen A. Panetta, 2019 IEEE-HKN President and Dean for Graduate Education at Tufts University has received the 2022 IEEE-HKN Distinguished Service Award “for outstanding contributions to the advancement of IEEE-HKN educational and professional programs.” Dr. Panetta was inducted into Tufts University’s Epsilon Delta Chapter of IEEE-HKN.
Dr. Thomas D. O’Sullivan, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of Notre Dame, is the recipient of the 2022 C. Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award “for contributions to creative and inclusive teaching and mentoring in electrical engineering and bioengineering.” Dr. O’Sullivan was inducted into Northwestern University’s Beta Tau Chapter of IEEE-HKN and is the Faculty Advisor for Notre Dame’s Delta Sigma Chapter.
Dr. Achuta Kadambi, Assistant Professor at the University of California Los Angeles Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received the Outstanding Young Professional Award “for contributions to creative and inclusive teaching and mentoring in electrical engineering and bioengineering.” Dr. Kadambi was inducted into the University of California Los Angeles’s Iota Gamma Chapter of IEEE-HKN.
Awards are expected to be presented in the IEEE Educational Activities Board Awards & Recognition Ceremony in Vancouver, BC, Canada, on 18 November 2022.
The 2022 IEEE-HKN Awards program was extremely competitive, having received a total of 70 nominations.
Madni Award winner Dr. Pisano has dedicated his career to promoting engineering as a force for the public good, according to his nominator. He is a highly visible figure nationally, in California, and on the UC San Diego campus. He is the Founding Chair of the National Academy of Engineering and the Division of Engineering and Physical Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Deans’ Roundtable. The roundtable meets annually to bring together U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) leadership with U.S. engineering deans and university leaders to discuss research and engineering issues relevant to DoD. He is active in the U.S. Council on Competitiveness and is a strong proponent of a national network of innovation centers for platform technologies organized as public-private partnerships.
Professor Pisano became Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering, the largest engineering school in California, in 2013. It currently ranks No. 10 of all engineering schools, public or private, in the U.S. He also has made myriad contributions to the invention, design, fabrication, optimization, and application of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). As Program Manager, he initiated the largest MEMS program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors in recognition of these achievements.
Dr. Panetta, the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award, was the IEEE-HKN President in 2019 and continues to lead initiatives and assists in cultivating significant sponsorships including from the Samueli Foundation and donations from Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak. These contributions propelled IEEE-HKN to new levels of giving and sponsorship and contributed to creating the first endowed HKN Award, namely, the Asad Madni Technical Achievement Award. She also created, with IEEE-HKN graduate students, the “Grad Lab” series of webinars to help prepare and
support students through graduate programs. Her diverse roles in IEEE have given her keen abilities to see and build partnerships across other IEEE organizations and societies, according to her nominator.
Outstanding Teaching Award recipient, Thomas D. O’Sullivan fosters excitement, motivation, curiosity, and creativity, instilling strong technical and communication skills in his students, according to his nominator. In six years, he has taught over 300 undergraduate and graduate students, advised 12 Ph.D. students, mentored 15 undergraduate research assistants, and advised two student groups, including IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu. He strives to create an inclusive learning environment and, this year, 46 percent of students enrolled in his technical elective are women, compared with about 30 percent of Electrical Engineering majors overall in the program.
Outstanding Young Professional award recipient, Dr. Achuta Kadambi, has commercialized his research in computational imaging into a thriving venture, known as Akasha Imaging. Beyond the startup, Prof. Kadambi leads a lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, that is looking to understand how the behavior of circuitry and gadgets vary across demographic types, according to his nominator. For example, light-based medical devices will perform less well on darker skin tones. Dr. Kadambi works with teams in EE, at the university’s medical school, and the Equity and Diversity Initiative (EDI) offices at UCLA to invent new devices that are fair. He also has taught “intro to computer science” courses at prisons to help reduce the rate of re-entry into the prison system.
Click here for more information on the IEEE-HKN Awards Program.
About IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu
Founded as Eta Kappa Nu in 1904 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, then changed to IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu (IEEE-HKN) following a merger with IEEE in 2010, IEEE-HKN is the academic honor society for those studying the IEEE fields of interest, including electrical and computer engineering. IEEE-HKN annually inducts over 3,000 students, faculty and professionals and has more than 200,000 alumni. The Society has chapters at more than 260 colleges and universities in the United States and around the world. Membership for students is by invitation only to those that possess outstanding academic achievement, character and attitude.
IEEE-HKN’s mission is to be the catalyst for the development of the “Complete Technical Professional.” Notable members include co-founder of Apple Inc. Steve Wozniak, “Father of the Internet” Vint Cerf, co-founder of Google Larry Page, and co-founder, Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation Gordon Moore, and Henry Samueli, co-founder of Broadcom.
