The University of Virginia Office of the Vice President for Research recently presented its seventh annual Research Achievement Awards. Of the 14 UVA faculty members who received the University’s highest research honors for 2025, half have primary appointments in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
“That’s a testament to the excellence of our faculty and their students, but it also speaks to their dedication to engineering for the greater good — research that makes a difference to real people,” said Jennifer L. West, dean of UVA Engineering. “In addition to contributions to the UVA research community, these awards recognize the recipients’ impact in their fields and the societal benefits that emanate from the knowledge they produce.”
UVA Engineering has achieved unprecedented research growth, with $94.5 million in new sponsored research awards in fiscal year 2025. It marks the second consecutive year the school has surpassed $90 million in new funding and reflects both faculty expertise and research program strength.
The school provides comprehensive support systems to enable its research agenda — from strategic internal funding and grant development programs to research communities that spark interdisciplinary collaboration. This integrated approach yields remarkable results for faculty, funding and research translation.
The Research Achievement Awards, inaugurated in 2019, are given for research that “exemplifies excellence across disciplines” and “reflects the breadth and vitality of UVA’s research enterprise,” according to a news release announcing all winners .
The UVA Engineering recipients follow below.
Two UVA Engineering faculty members received the Distinguished Researcher Award, given to researchers who are making an impact in their fields and society through significant discoveries and who are acknowledged as leaders in their fields.
Patrick Hopkins , the Whitney Stone Professor of Engineering and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is known for developing methods and instruments using powerful lasers to measure thermal conductivity: how energy moves through and interacts with materials, especially where two materials come together at an interface.
Hopkins’ laser techniques are uniquely capable of characterizing these properties at the smallest time and space scales and at temperature poles — from deep-freeze cold to surface-of-the-sun hot. His work makes it possible to design new materials or electronic devices to perform under the most extreme conditions and temperatures, such as hypersonic flight, space travel or power-intensive computing applications.
He has commercialized some of his innovations through Laser Thermal, a company he co-founded that provides material thermal testing services and equipment to academic, government and industry labs.
“Dr. Hopkins is one of the nation’s leaders in thermal transport science and has a great track record of impact in the field,” said Samuel Graham, dean of Engineering and Nariman Farvadin Professor, University of Maryland.
Zongli Lin , the Ferman W. Perry Professor of Engineering and Applied Science and professor of electrical and computer engineering, is a global leader in nonlinear control theory and its applications. Control theory helps to regulate the behavior of systems. Control systems help cars stay steady on the road, keep our homes comfortable, and coordinate teams of robots. They even support important processes in our bodies.
His foundational research has transformed the field through seminal contributions to control systems with actuator saturation, time-delay systems, reinforcement learning control and multi-agent systems.
Lin’s work, which has been cited more than 30,000 times, has advanced both theory and practice, with applications in flight control, energy systems and biomedical devices.
“Zongli Lin has almost single-handedly put UVA on the control theory map,” said Scott Acton , the American Telephone and Telegraph Company Professor of Engineering and chair of the UVA Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Associate professor of electrical and computer engineering Xu Yi earned the Research Excellence Award for a high volume of high-quality work and recognition by peers in the field as an emerging leader.
Yi’s research centers on moving optical frequency combs, a technology that previously enabled ultra-precise measurements of light waves, from bulky lab systems to deployable microchips. Such precision is necessary to advance technologies like telecommunications, GPS and sensing systems.
His group was the first to demonstrate a deterministic “quantum microcomb,” a breakthrough that opens the door to scalable photonic quantum computing. This first is an extraordinary achievement, said Acton, Yi’s department chair.
“Even a non-expert can see that Prof. Yi’s work will impact the quantum computing of the future,” Acton said.
Yi’s team has also used his chip-scale microcombs to generate record-low-noise microwave and millimeter-wave signals — outperforming large commercial signal generators by 1,000 times. These ultra-stable signals are critical for next-generation wireless networks, radar and precision sensing technologies.
This year’s Research Collaboration Award went to mechanical and aerospace engineering professors Hilary Bart-Smith and Haibo Dong and Daniel Quinn , an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and electrical and computer engineering. The award honors a team’s unique and significant research contributions as well as innovative approaches to the process of research collaborations by the team members.
Bart-Smith, Dong and Quinn have collaborated for 17 years to advance underwater propulsion and bio-inspired robotic systems by studying and replicating the dynamics of locomotion in fishes. Their work is the basis for designing underwater propulsive mechanisms with superior maneuverability and greater efficiency than current propeller-based systems.
Their work has resulted in more than 100 joint publications, development of the UVA Tunabot and its successors , and external grants totaling $28 million to date — including funding for the world’s widest academic recirculating water channel. When complete, the $1.4 million facility will enable the team to study swarming schools of robotic fish.
“I regard these three UVA faculty collectively as the number one group worldwide in the study of bioinspired propulsion systems,” said Harvard University’s Henry Bryant Bigelow Professor of Ichthyology George Lauder, who has partnered with the UVA researchers for years and co-authored a number of papers.
Jason Papin , Harrison Distinguished Teaching Professor and professor of biomedical engineering, was recognized with the Research Mentor Award for helping other faculty succeed in their research careers.
Papin has guided colleagues — many of whom wrote in support of his nomination — through grant writing, collaboration and career development.
“I pick his brain on things that are mysterious to new faculty. How many Ph.D. committees should I be on? What’s the strategy for writing first grants?” said Daniel Abebayehu, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering.
For someone who’s not his formal mentor, “Jason has helped me navigate the places where there are no hard and fast rules,” Abebayehu said.
As director of the National Institutes of Health-funded iTHRIV Scholars Program , Papin has helped launch the careers of more than 42 faculty across UVA and partner institutions such as Virginia Tech and the Carilion Clinic.
The award is Papin’s latest for mentoring and advising, including the 2024 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Mentorship from the School of Medicine.
“With his passion and effectiveness for mentoring, Jason Papin exemplifies the standard for faculty mentorship,” said Amy Bouton, UVA professor of microbiology, immunology and cancer biology.
Mathews Jacob , electrical and computer engineering
Kevin Janes , biomedical engineering
Arthur W. Lichtenberger , electrical and computer engineering
Jeffrey Saucerman , biomedical engineering
Natasha Sheybani , biomedical engineering
Haydn Wadley , materials science and engineering
Xu Yi , electrical and computer engineering
Daniel Abebayehu , biomedical engineering
Tom Barker , biomedical engineering
Laura Barnes , systems and information engineering
Bryan W. Berger , chemical engineering and biomedical engineering
Nicola Bezzo , electrical and computer engineering
Camille Bilodeau , chemical engineering
Silvia Blemker , biomedical engineering
James Burns , materials science and engineering
Liheng Cai , materials science and engineering and chemical engineering
Coleen Carrigan , engineering and society
Sandhya Dwarkadas , computer science
Sebastian Elbaum , computer science
Xinfeng Gao , mechanical and aerospace engineering
Patrick Hopkins , mechanical and aerospace engineering
Tariq Iqbal , systems and information engineering and computer science
Yen-Ling Kuo , computer science
Arthur Lichtenberger , electrical and computer engineering
Shayn Peirce-Cottler , biomedical engineering
Kevin Skadron , computer science
Mircea Stan , electrical and computer engineering
Nick Vecchiarello , chemical engineering
Ashish Venkat , computer science
Shangtong Zhang , computer science
Leonid Zhigilei , materials science and engineering