Awards and Recognition

Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor, had his research featured on the July 2026 front cover of Chemical Science for the paper “Rethinking Peptide Developability with Sequence-Only Models: Interpretable Screening of Microplastic-Binding Peptides with Gated Query Pooling.”

Kenji Yasuda, assistant professor, received the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Early Career Scientist Prize in Semiconductors, recognizing the impact of Yasuda’s contributions to semiconductor and quantum materials physics.

Khurram Khan Afridi, professor, Judy Cha, the Rick and Betty Tsai Ph.D. 1981 Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, Damian E. Helbling, professor, and Sriramya Nair, assistant professor, are among several Cornell faculty to receive 2026 Academic Venture Fund grants from the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor in Energy Systems Engineering, has been selected as the winner of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ 2026 Himmelblau Award for Innovations in Computer-Based Chemical Engineering Education.

Irina Kopyeva, a postdoctoral researcher in the Fischbach Lab, has received a postdoctoral grant from the Weill Cornell Medicine Clinical and Translational Science Center to investigate how menopause influences breast adipose tissue remodeling and fibrosis, and how these changes may contribute to breast cancer development and progression.

Graduate students Shake Karepetyan (David Muller Group) and Shripathi Ramakrishnan (Qiuming Yu Group) have received Gold Graduate Student Awards by the Materials Research Society.

Kapil Gangwar, Ph.D. candidate (Edwin Kan Group), has been selected to participate in the 75th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany, as a Young Scientist. The meeting brings together Nobel laureates and early-career scientists from around the world.

Kayla Wolf, assistant professor, has been awarded a 2025-26 Affinito-Stewart Grant from the President’s Council of Cornell Women. Wolf will use the award for her project, “Modeling How Fibrosis Impacts Function in the Aging Ovary,” to advance research on how age-related fibrosis, or tissue scarring, affects ovarian function.

Three Systems Engineering students, advised by field member Timur Dogan, received prizes at International Building Performance Simulation Association-USA’s SimBuild 2026 awards ceremony. Doctoral candidates Jaeha Kim and Chengxuan Li won the simulation showcase, while M.S. student Sabrina Liang and Dogan took first place in the best simulation paper competition.

Himani Mishra ’27, a rising senior in engineering physics, has been named a 2026 Microscopy & Microanalysis Student Scholar by the Microanalysis Society, recognizing her paper, “Atomic-level, Depth-Resolved 3D Imaging of Voids with Electron Ptychography.” Mishra, who works in the lab of David Muller will be honored during the opening plenary session of the 2026 conference on August 3.