Department of Mechanical Engineering

Three ME students earn spring 2009 excellence awards

 

Each semester, the Graduate College at Iowa State recognizes top graduate scholars with Research and Teaching Excellence Awards. Three ME students recently earned these honors as a result of their outstanding academic careers.

Som Shrestha was presented with a Teaching Excellence Award, which recognizes the top 10 percent of graduate students for outstanding achievement in teaching. Pavan Kumar Karra and Yan Yan each received a Research Excellence Award, which honors the top 10 percent of graduate students at the time of their graduation for outstanding research accomplishments as documented by their theses and dissertations. These students were selected and nominated by their major professors.

Shrestha, whose major professor was Associate Professor Greg Maxwell, taught ME 231, Engineering Thermodynamics, during the fall and spring semesters. As a lead graduate student at the Industrial Assessment Center, he mentored five graduate students and more than 15 undergraduate students in developing energy conservation recommendations.

Additionally, he conducted research to evaluate the performance of carbon dioxide sensors used in heating, ventilating, and air conditioning applications. He represented the ME department at the Graduate and Professional Student Senate for two years, served as an advisory board member for the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, and was a member of the Graduate Council at Iowa State. Shrestha has accepted a building scientist position with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Advised by Professor Abhijit Chandra, Karra’s research focused on improving chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP)—a process during semiconductor device fabrication that polishes silicon wafers.

This work, detailed in his dissertation, “Modeling and control of material removal and defectivity in chemical mechanical planarization,” quantified nanoparticle agglomeration as a function of chemical environment. His research has the potential to help cut costs associated with CMP by reducing damage to wafers that typically occurs as a result of the polishing process.

Studying under Assistant Professor Qingze Zou, Yan looked at fast atomic force microscope (AFM) imaging and probe-based nanofabrication. The title of her dissertation is “Control approach to high-speed large-range AFM imaging and nanofabrication,” and it conveys how she used novel iterative control techniques developed by Zou’s group to compensate for adverse vibrational dynamics and hysteresis effects in challenging nanotechnology and nanosciences areas.

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