Awards and Recognition

Semida Silveira, professor of practice, addressed the plenary at the United Nation’s International Vienna Energy and Climate Forum, hosted April 9-10 in Austria, where she highlighted the need to consider energy not only as a requirement for development but also as a major vector of development, using energy investments as a source of multiplying effects on regional economies.

Jillian Goldfarb, associate professor, prepared her students to win the New York State Pollution Prevention Institute competition with their project “Circularity Beyond Compost: Valorizing Cornell’s Food Waste through Hydrothermal Liquefaction.”

Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor, received the 2025 Outstanding Article award from the journal EES Solar for the paper “Circular Management of Perovskite Solar Cells by Green Solvents.

Congratulations to the following faculty and staff on receiving 2026 Graduate Excellence and Impact Awards.

Community Access & Outreach Award – Within Cornell 

• Master of Engineering Programs Support Team (Cornell Duffield Engineering) 

Casey Moore Impact Award 

• Sam Benson, assistant director for Sibley School graduate affairs

Faculty Champion Award – Early Career Faculty 

• Megan Holycross, assistant professor

Faculty Champion Award – Advanced Career Faculty 

• Clifford Whitcomb, professor of practice
• Matthew Pritchard, Sidney Kaufman Professor of Geophysics

Joel Brock, the Given Foundation Professor of Engineering, received the 2026 Acta Materialia, Inc. Hollomon Award for Materials & Society at the TMS annual meeting in San Diego. The award recognizes demonstrated leadership in promoting the understanding of the relations and the interactions between materials technology and societal interests/needs or contributions to materials technology that have had major impact on society.

Mohamed Ibrahim, assistant professor, has received an NSF CAREER Award for his proposal, “CAREER: Efficient Multiplexed Classical Interfaces for Scalable Cryogenic Quantum Processors.”  This project seeks to overcome the key input/output bottleneck in scalable cryogenic quantum computing by developing energy-efficient, multiplexed photonic ingress and sub-THz egress interfaces.

Lara Estroff, chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Herbert Fisk Johnson Professor of Industrial Chemistry, has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society.

Mostafa Hassani, assistant professor, received the MPMD Early Career Leaders Professional Development Award from The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. The MPMD Early Career Leaders Professional Development Award provides an opportunity for emerging, professional members of TMS to advance in the field of materials science through participation in society activities.

Kenji Yasuda, assistant professor, won the 2026 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator’s Award in Nanoscale Computing Devices and Systems for his work, “Superlubric Sliding Ferroelectrics for Ultralow-Power Nonvolatile Memory.”

Jonathan Butcher, the Joseph Newton Pew Jr. Professor in Engineering, has been selected to receive the 2026 Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellowship. Butcher was honored for his ongoing engaged research collaboration with Tuskegee University and his plans to expand the Tuskegee–Cornell University Biomedical Engineering Scholars (TCUBES) into a model program for community-engaged engineering training at Cornell.