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.
UConn ECE has moved up to #63 on the 2026 US News graduate rankings.
Faculty Honors and Awards
Prof. Omer Khan was inducted into the Connecticut Academy for Science and Engineering
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. He also hosted the first Northeast Power Electronics Symposium in November 2024. The event was the first major event sponsored by the CONPEX center and had over 100 attendees. Prof. Bazzi was also selected as a winner of the 2025 Distinguished Engineering Educator Award by the College of Engineering.
Prof. Faquir Jain received the 2025 UConn AAUP Outstanding Contribution Award. Furthermore, in honor of his contribution of service and leadership, the chapter has decided to rename the award the UConn-AAUP Faquir Jain Excellence Award.
Assistant Prof. Junbo Zhao received several awards and recognitions such as:
- Received an NSF Career Award
- Two Technical Committee Working Group Awards for IEEE Power and Energy Society
- Highly cited paper by Web of Science for “Physics-Informed Graphical Representation-Enabled Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robust Distribution System Voltage Control”
- Received the IEEE CT Section Outstanding Early Career Academic Member Award
- Became Fellow of IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology)
- Named an Early-Career Research Fellow by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
- Named Best Associate Editor for International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems
- Chair of an IEEE Task Force that received an IEEE PES Technical Committee Prize Paper Award for an IEEE Transactions on Power Systems paper. His graduate student Soroush Vahedi and former postdoc Ankur Srivastava also contributed to the paper.
- Part of a team led by General Electric that was awarded a $1.3M grant from the Department of Energy’s Wholesale Electric Market Studies and Engagement (WEMSE) Program. UConn’s share is $450K.
- Received CSEE Journal of Power and Energy Systems 2024 Excellent Young Subject Editor Award
- Received best paper award from IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid
- Selected as a member of IEEE’s Public Visibility Committee
- Had a paper selected for the cover piece for Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering journal
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. Yaakov Bar-Shalom gave the Virtual AESS Distinguished Lecture “Maximum Likelihood Identification of Stochastic Models of Inertial Sensors: Wiener and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Processes with their CRLB” for the AESS Education Committee. Also his paper “Maximum Likelihood Identification of Stochastic Models of Inertial Sensor Noises”, with Graduate student Shida Ye, has been selected by the Naval Undersea Warfare center to be posted on their Wall of Innovation, and he received a best paper award at the Fusion 2025 Conference.
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.
Assistant Prof. Zongjie Wang won the Connecticut Women of Innovation Award from the Connecticut Technology Council, and was interviewed on the “Good Morning Connecticut” news show. She has also earned a Rising Star Award from the CT Power and Energy Society.
Several ECE Faculty were recognized in a study by Stanford as being in the top 2% of scientists, including Dr. Bansal, Dr. Bar-Shalom, Dr. Bazzi, Dr. Javidi, Dr. Katsouleas, Dr. Pattipati, Dr. Willett, Dr. Zhao, Dr. Zhou, and Dr. Cao. The Stanford rankings evaluate over 6 million researchers globally, identifying the top 100,000 based on career-long or single-year outputs in 22 scientific fields and 174 subfields. Congratulations to all!.
Associate Prof. Sung Yeul Park has been appointed the Charles H Knapp Associate Professorship.
Graduate Student Awards
At the ECE Poster Competition, Alaa Selim, advised by Junbo Zhao, won first place, Yingyi Tang, advised by Junbo Zhao, and Mohamadamin Rajabinezhad, advised by Susan Zuo, each won second place, and Kenneth Johnson, advised by Ali Bazzi, won third place. At the College of Engineering’s poster competition, Soroush Vahedi won the Departmental award for ECE and Alaa Selim received an honorable mention.
Graduate student Alaa Selim, advised by Junbo Zhao, won 2nd place in the Eversource Energy Center Annual Workshop Poster Competition.
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 the CoE Entrepreneurship hub.
Alaa Selim, Souroush Vahedi, Haoyi Wang and Jinxian Zhang were selected for the DOE ARPA-E Summit Student Program.
Alaa Selim received the IEEE PES Grid Edge conference PhD Dissertation Award. He also won first place in the data science and Artificial Intelligence research category at the inaugural Graduate Research Symposium, and had his startup idea, focused on AI-Powered Battery Optimization, selected as one of the innovation showcases for the IEEE Energy and Policy Forum.
The IEEE PELS & PES Student Chapter at UConn received the best medium sized student chapter award, which is on a GLOBAL scale, and the IEEE Controls Systems Society student chapter received a $1000 award from the IEEE CT Section.
Mohamadamin Rajabinhezad was selected as a winner of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society Students and Young Professionals Paper Assistance Award for the IECON’24 conference, and was also selected to serve as the Activities Director for John Lof Leadership Academy 2025-26 E-Board.
Soroush Vahedi’s startup idea, Powerbid (a platform that connects home solar producers and consumers to a more sustainable and efficient energy grid), was selected as one of 14 finalists for UConn’s 2025 Innovation Quest Program, and selected for inclusion in the Virtual Showcase at the 2025 Yale Innovation Summit.
Aalvee Asad Kausani has won a Best Oral Paper award at the Connecticut Symposium on Microelectronics and Optoelectronics, and Nick Pappas and Haoyi Wang have won for Best Poster Paper.
Graduate student Yi Zhang, advised by Susan Zuo, received a Synchrony Fellowship for the Fall 2025 semester.
Shengqi Yuan and Alaa Selim, both advised by Junbo Zhao, have each won a Best paper award from the IEEE PES General Meeting 2025.
Graduate student Efstathia Safikou, advised by George Bollas, was selected to attend the iREDEFINE Workshop, a workshop designed to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities among ECE faculty. She also has received the Outstanding Senior Women Academic Achievement Award.
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
Nick Martins has successfully won the “Runner-Up Undergraduate Presentation” at the 2024 North American Power Symposium.
Spring 2024’s senior design team 2415, Hritish Bhargava and Samuel Gresh, advised by Susan Zuo, not only won 1st place in the ECE senior design competition, but also won 1st place at the Draper Labs Capstone Symposium and the PW-IASE Capstone Competition for their project titled “Robotic Perception Sensor Characterization Platform.”
Vatsal Bandaru has won a Best Oral Paper award at the Connecticut Symposium on Microelectronics and Optoelectronics.
Senior Design Winners:
- 1st place: Team 2513: Electric Powered Boat (joint with ME); Sponsor: ASNE
Team members: Joshua Colon, Xingyu Qiu, Thomas Clark
[This team was part of the recently founded electric-powered boat club at UConn. As a club, it competed in the ASNE Promoting Electric Propulsion Competition against teams from 38 other universities and finished in the top half.]
- 2nd place:Team 2514: Development of User-Enabled Flight Controls for Energy-Efficient Aircraft Operation; Sponsor: Sikorsky;
- Team members: Neo Joseph, James Weber, Kevin Loja
- 3rd place: Team 2512: Continuous Glucose Monitoring System (joint with CSE); Sponsor: Biorasis;
- Team members: Erin Mitchell, Witold Klos
Senior Design Team 2502, comprising Jackson Landino, Kevin Le, and Julia Lord, and advised by Ali Bazzi, won 3rd place in the IEEE CT Section Capstone Project Competition on April 19th. Their project was titled “Power Quality Monitoring of Moderate-Sized Facilities” and sponsored by HSB.
Undergraduate student Kevin Marquis was selected as one of the four College of Engineering Commencement banner carriers. The banner carriers are the graduating seniors with the highest cumulative GPAs. Since Kevin was one of many students with a 4.0, there was an additional selection process this year that took into account the student’s undergraduate activities and engagement.
Alumni Awards
Qin Lu (’18, b) and Yongduk Lee (’15) have been selected as recipients of the UConn College of Engineering GOLD Rising Star Award.
Fellowships
| Alaa Selim | Sikorsky Fellowship |
| Benjamin Brown | Peter Willett Fellowship |
| Qian Yang | Vijaya Raghavan Fellowship-Summer |
| 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 |
| Anna Kelly | Vijaya Raghavan Fellowship-Spring |
| 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 | N/A |
| Spring 2025 |
Allen Legaassey and Zongming Li |
