By Amy Kim
The Georgia Tech chapter of Sigma Xi has recognized its 2022 Research Award winners, including two faculty members from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Since its founding in 1886, Sigma Xi—a national scientific honor society—has rewarded excellence in scientific research and encouraged a sense of companionship and cooperation among scientists in all fields. The Georgia Tech chapter has been in operation since 1946 and has been recognizing outstanding students and faculty from numerous academic fields each spring.
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This year, transportation systems professor Samuel Coogan took home one of two Young Faculty Awards, which recognizes young teaching faculty who lead improvements in research methods and programs at Georgia Tech, as evidenced by publications and program development results. A Georgia Tech faculty member since 2017, Coogan currently researches safe autonomy and control of cyber-physical systems with a focus on applications in transportation.
“It is an honor to win this award on behalf of my entire research group,” he said. “I am very appreciative of the support I’ve received from both the Schools of ECE and CEE, and I think this award demonstrates the benefits of Georgia Tech’s efforts to promote and foster cross-disciplinary research programs such as mine.”
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Jianfeng Zhou, current assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s Shenzen campus, won the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award for his research as a Ph.D. candidate. His research focuses on locally enhanced electric field treatment, a new water disinfection technology, which kills pathogenic microorganisms in water. The technology he developed disinfects bodies of water and avoids carcinogenic disinfection by-products found in other treatment solutions.
“I'd like to thank our School Chair Dr. Donald Webster and my advisor Dr. Xing Xie for their kind nomination of the award,” Zhou said. “This is a wonderful ending point of my student life at Tech. I'm honored to compete [for] the award as a representative of CEE and finally get the award.”