Awards/Honors 2024-2025
The UConn ECE Department is now ranked 35th nationally in the 2024 Research.com ranking of top universities in the field of Electronics and Electrical Engineering.
Faculty Honors and Awards
Prof. Ali Bazzi has been appointed as the Madonna Chair in Power Engineering, and was featured in a Hartford Courant article on solar panel energy.
Assistant Prof. Junbo Zhao received several awards at the IEEE Power and Energy Society General meeting, including two Technical Committee Working Group Awards for Outstanding technical Report and a Technical Commitee Distinguished Individual Service Award. Also, his paper “Physics-Informed Graphical Representation-Enabled Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robust Distribution System Voltage Control” is now considered a highly cited paper by Web of Science.
Professor Emeritus Matt Mashikian and his wife Margarethe have made a gift for an endowed fund to support the newly named “Matthew and Margarethe Mashikian Entrepreneurship Hub” in the College of Engineering. Dr. Mashikian was a faculty member in the ESE department from 1983 to his retirement in 1997. He founded IMCORP, a technology leader in underground power cable life cycle condition assessment and performance.
Prof. Peter Willett was awarded the 2024 Yaakov Bar-Shalom Award for a Lifetime of Excellence in Information Fusion by the International Society of Information Fusion.
Graduate Student Awards
Graduate students Yansong Pei, Alaa Selim, and Bendong Tan, all advised by Junbo Zhao, were selected as finalists in the 3-minute PhD dissertation competition at the 2025 Grid Edge Technologies Conference.
Graduate student Umar Salman, advised by Zongjie Wang, was selected to join the 2024 Clean Energy & Sustainability Innovation Program. In addition, he, and his colleague Jacckine Okoye from Columbia University formed a Clean Utilities for Affordable Housing team that was selected by the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance as the top team in the East and Southern Africa region for 2024.
Kevin Lindstrom has been awarded a Directed Energy Professional Society (DEPS) Graduate Research Grant.
Alaa Selim and Soroush Vahedi were awarded the Entrepreneurship Fellowship from UConn college of engineering.
The Clean Energy Summit at UConn featured several ECE students
Left photo:ECE students Alaa Selim (speaking), Soroush Vahedi (at podium) and teammate Morteza Azizi from CEE presented their ideas at the summit. Right photo: ECE student Umar Salman (at podium) and his teammates Binit Gautam, CEE, and Charitarth Chugh, Math and Statistics also delivered presentations.
Undergraduate Student Awards
Fellowships
| Alaa Selim | Sikorsky Fellowship |
| Benjamin Brown | Peter Willett Fellowship |
| Qian Yang | Vijaya Raghavan Fellowship |
| Kalinath Katuri | Eversource Fellowship |
| Shengqi Yuan | Eversource Fellowship |
| Haoyi Wang | Eversource Fellowship |
| Shaya Abou Jawdeh | Eversource Fellowship |
| Yingyi Tang | GE Next Generation Fellowship |
| Bendong Tan | Summer Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship |
| Gokul Krishnan | Summer Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship |
| Kashif Usmani | Summer Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship |
| Zijiao Tian | Summer Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship |
| Kalinath Katuri | Eversource Fellowship |
| Mohamadamin Rajabinezahd | Synchrony Fellowship |
| Ayah Abdallah | P&W Fellowship |
| Gokul Krishnan | SPIE Optics and Photonic Scholarship |
| Alaa Selim | Entrepreneurship Fellowship |
| Soroush Vahedi | Entrepreneurship Fellowship |
TA Awards
| Fall 2024 | |
| Spring 2025 |
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Alumni Awards
