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The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced today that Karen Willcox, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and Al Bovik, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas of Austin, have been elected to the prestigious academy for 2022. In addition, alumni Michael Watkins and Ahmad Abdelrazaq have also been elected.

Election to the academy is among the highest professional distinctions bestowed upon an engineer. Membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research and practice, including pioneering new and developing fields of technology and making major advancements in the engineering field and profession. In all, 111 new members and 22 foreign members joined the NAE in 2022.

“Throughout their careers, Al, Karen, Michael and Ahmad have been among the nation’s leading experts in their respective fields,” said Roger Bonnecaze, interim dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering. “From space exploration to streaming video quality, these four newly elected members have made significant contributions in a wide variety of engineering disciplines — a testament to the Cockrell School’s breadth, depth and overall excellence. We are extremely proud and honored to call them Texas Engineers.”

During the past decade, more than 15 UT Austin professors have been elected as new members to the NAE, and the university has almost 50 current and retired members.

About the four new members representing UT Austin:

Karen Willcox is director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin and holds the W.A. “Tex” Moncrief Jr. Endowment in Simulation-Based Engineering and Sciences Chair No. 5 and the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Centennial Chair in Computing Systems. She is also a professor in the Cockrell School’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. Willcox is being recognized for contributions to computational engineering methods for the design and optimal control of high-dimensional systems with uncertainties. Her research has produced scalable computational methods for design of next-generation engineered systems, with a particular focus on model reduction as a way to learn principled approximations from data and on multifidelity formulations to leverage multiple sources of uncertain information. Prior to joining UT Austin in 2018, Willcox spent 17 years on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as the founding co-director of the MIT Center for Computational Engineering. She is a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics as well as a member of the American Society for Engineering Education. Willcox received a bachelor’s degree in engineering science from the University of Auckland and master’s and doctoral degrees from MIT, both in aeronautics and astronautics.

Michael Watkins (B.S. Aerospace Engineering 1983, M.S. ASE 1985, Ph.D. ASE 1990) is a professor of aerospace and geophysics at the California Institute of Technology, following five years serving as director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is being recognized for leadership in the development of space geodesy and leading robotic missions for exploration of the Earth and planetary bodies. Prior to joining JPL as director, Watkins was a professor in the Cockrell School’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and director of UT’s Center for Space Research. Before that, he spent 22 years at JPL, where he led some of NASA’s most high-profile missions, including the Mars Curiosity Rover and the Cassini, Mars Odyssey and Deep Impact probes, in addition to leading the science development for the GRAIL moon-mapping satellites. Watkins, who is a pioneer in the development and use of gravity data in science applications, also originated the concept for the GRACE and GRACE Follow-On missions, which use twin satellites to measure Earth’s gravity field. Watkins received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from UT Austin, all in aerospace engineering.

Alan Bovik holds the Cockrell Family Regents Chair in Engineering #3 in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is being recognized for contributions to the development of tools for image and video quality assessment. Bovik’s work broadly focuses on creating new theories and algorithms that allow for the perceptually optimized streaming and sharing of visual media. He is the director of the UT Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering and a member of the Wireless Networking and Communication Group, the Institute for Neuroscience and the Machine Learning Laboratory. He has published over 1,000 technical articles and holds several U.S. patents. Bovik, who joined UT Austin in 1984, has received numerous recognitions for his work, including two Emmy Awards, the Progress Medal from the Royal Photographic Society, the Edison Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing and the Edwin H. Land Medal from The Optical Society of America. He is a fellow of IEEE, The Optical Society of America, the Society of Photo-Optical and Instrumentation Engineers and honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. Bovik received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has also been honored with a Distinguished Alumni Award.

Ahmad Abdelrazaq (B.S. Civil Engineering 1984, M.S. CE 1986) is senior executive vice president of the Highrise Building and Structural Engineering Divisions at Samsung C&T Corporation. He is being recognized for innovation in design, construction and health monitoring of the world’s tallest and most complex building structures. Since joining Samsung in 2004, Abdelrazaq has been involved in all aspects of construction planning, preconstruction services and structural design of many prominent building projects, including the Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building in the world, and Jumeriah Gardens in Dubai, and the Samsung HQ, Inchon Tower, Korean World Trade Center and the Yongsan Landmark Tower in Seoul. As chief technical director for the Burj Khalifa project, he played a key role in the development of the structural and foundation systems for the tower from initial design concept through completion. Abdelrazaq also currently serves as a visiting professor at Seoul National University. Previously, he was associate partner and senior project structural engineer at Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP in Chicago, as well as an adjunct professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Abdelrazaq received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UT Austin, both in civil engineering.

Professor Noel Clemens has been selected to receive the 2022 AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) Aerodynamic Measurement Technology Award. The award, established in 1995, is presented annually to a researcher who has exhibited continued contributions and achievements toward the advancement of advanced aerodynamics flowfield and surface measurement techniques for research in flight and ground test applications. Clemens was selected “for the development and application of innovative laser-based imaging techniques to bring new insight into the physics of complex turbulent flows.”

Clemens, who has been a faculty member of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at UT Austin since 1993, focuses his research in the area of hypersonics, experimental gas dynamics, experimental methods and combustion. He specializes in measurement technology using laser imaging diagnostics to study mixing, combustion, ablation, shock/boundary layer interactions and other high-speed unsteady flows.

Throughout his career, Clemens has made many important contributions toward aerodynamic measurement technology, especially applications of planar imaging methods to challenging flow environments, such as hypersonic flows, mixing, combustion and plasmas. Achievements include multi-parameter measurements using a combination of techniques such as PIV (particle image velocimetry), PLIF (planar laser induced fluorescence), Rayleigh scattering, pressure sensitive paint, digital image correlation, and laser-induced incandescence. According to Google Scholar his published works have been cited over 6,500 times.

He is a pioneer in applying advanced diagnostics to supersonic and hypersonic flows. His group was the first to apply kilohertz PIV in supersonic flows, and the first to apply PIV to hypersonic flows. As they advanced the technology, pushing acquisition rates to higher and higher speeds, their work revealed new physical phenomena. His work in supersonic boundary layers revealed, for the first time, the presence of very large-scale coherent structures (“superstructures”) in the boundary layer, and their influence on shock-induced turbulent separation. His recent work involves using combined PIV, pressure sensitive paint and digital image correlation to understand the interaction between shock-induced turbulent separation unsteadiness and the vibration of compliant structures. 

Clemens has made major contributions in scalar imaging, especially the planar laser-induced fluorescence technique. Together with collaborators from Sandia, he invented the krypton PLIF method, which enables measurements of a conserved scalar in reacting flows, and can be used as a non-toxic flow marker in high-speed wind tunnels. He also was the first to use the sublimation of solid-phase naphthalene to investigate ablation-products transport in hypersonic boundary layers. His innovation was to measure the dispersion of the ablation products with PLIF of gas-phase naphthalene. This work led to the first demonstration of simultaneous scalar-velocity measurements in hypersonic boundary layers.

A key aspect of Clemens’ work over the years has been to carefully quantify the effect of the measurement system on the quality of the measurements. In a series of papers his group quantified the effect of imaging system resolution, noise, filtering and aliasing, on the measured data. Using these results, Clemens was able to design unique experiments that enabled him to investigate the structure of the finest-scales of turbulence in both non-reacting and reacting flows.

Currently, Clemens is the director of the ULI FAST for Hypersonics Aerodynamics Measurements (AFOSR/NASA) that focuses on developing a new measurement technology for hypersonic flight. This novel technique will re-define sensing and analysis of hypersonic vehicles, and could eventually be applied to lower-speed aircraft as well. Learn more about all of his group’s current research projects on his website.

Clemens is a Fellow of AIAA and the American Physical Society. He is the winner of three AIAA Best Paper Awards, served as associate editor of the AIAA Journal for two years, and served as the Editor-in-Chief of Experiments in Fluids for three years. He served as the chair of the ASE/EM Department at UT Austin from 2012-2020 and holds the Clare Cockrell Williams Centennial Chair in Engineering.

The award, which includes a personalized certificate and engraved medal, will be presented to Clemens during the AIAA SciTech Forum Awards Ceremony in January of 2022.

Jayant Sirohi, a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, has been named a Technical Fellow of the Vertical Flight Society (VFS) for 2021. The society, which was originally established as the American Helicopter Society in 1943, is the world’s oldest and largest technical society dedicated to the understanding and advancement of vertical flight technology.

Technical fellowships are granted to VHS members who are leading careers and developing technology that significantly advances the interests of the vertical flight community. Sirohi was selected for “pioneering contributions over 20 years on the theory and application of smart sensors and actuators in vertical lift, and experimental research of coaxial rotor systems, which have greatly expanded and enriched the body of knowledge.”

Sirohi’s work focuses on investigating the fundamental physics of different types of vertical lift aircraft, such as coaxial, counter-rotating helicopters and electric aircraft for urban air mobility, by means of various experimental and computational tools. His group’s goal is to expand the capabilities and understanding of the complex aeroelastic behavior of future vertical take-off aerial vehicles. He is the principal investigator of the Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence funded by U. S. Army, Navy and NASA and is currently developing new rotor technology for the next generation of vertical lift aircraft. 

Before joining the Cockrell School of Engineering, Sirohi worked at Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, where he was a staff engineer in the Advanced Concepts group. At Sikorsky, he was involved with the conceptual design of next-generation vertical take-off aircraft, as well as the performance enhancement of existing rotorcraft using advanced technologies.  

Sirohi earned a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park and joined the department in 2008. He holds the M.J. Thompson Regents Professorship in Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. Learn more about Sirohi’s research.

Aerospace engineering graduate student Julie Vi Pham is one of only 20 students across the globe named to Aviation Week Network’s 20 Twenties Class of 2021. Winners are selected not only for their academic performance, but also for their ability to communicate the value of their research and to contribute to a broader community. According to Aviation Week Network’s press release, the program “brings together technology hiring managers, students and faculty worldwide to recognize what’s needed for business and academic growth and success.”

Pham, who received her B.S.E. in mechanical engineering at Arizona State University, is pursuing a master’s degree and ultimately a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at UT Austin under the advisement of Karen Willcox, a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics (ASE/EM), and the director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

“My research uses scientific machine learning and physics-based reduced-order models to provide a mathematical foundation for predictive digital twins in the aerospace field,” said Pham. “This work advances the robustness of real-time control and decision-making in autonomous systems, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and hypersonic vehicles.”

Pham is currently developing a novel sensing strategy for hypersonic environments, called the Full-Airframe Sensing Technology (FAST).

“The strategy employs inverse methods with machine learning to infer quantities of interest, such as distributed pressure loads, from indirect measurements of structural deformation. The FAST methodology can enable advanced hypersonic vehicles with predictive sensing and control capabilities.”

Pham said she is also passionate about contributing to the broader STEM community through teaching, mentorship and outreach. During her undergraduate years, she played an active role in tutoring and research mentoring to help students from all backgrounds succeed in technical fields. At UT, Pham is serving as the president of the Graduate Ladies of Aerospace and Mechanics (GLAM) organization which was established to create a welcoming environment for all ASE/EM graduate students, and to promote diversity and inclusion in these fields.

Pham plans to work as a research engineer in either industry or at a national laboratory after graduating from UT Austin.

NASA and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research are backing a team of four universities, led by The University of Texas at Austin, in a project to redefine sensing and analysis of hypersonic vehicles, which can travel at least five times the speed of sound and potentially revolutionize space and air travel.

The three-year, $3.3 million project is funded by NASA’s University Leadership Initiative, and the team’s goal is to create a new paradigm in sensing for hypersonic vehicles, which could also be applied to lower-speed craft. The project — Full Airframe Sensing Technology (FAST) — will treat the vehicles themselves as sensors, analyzing aerodynamic changes during flight tests, and use that information to infer where force is being applied so they can better protect and control the vehicles.

“We are taking conventional sensors and distributing them across the vehicle, allowing them to make measurements they weren’t meant to make,” said Noel Clemens, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and leader of the project. “By getting information from all the sensors simultaneously, we will be able to analyze the shape of the vehicle and infer the distribution of forces acting on the vehicle.”

Typical sensors are tiny and only measure a very narrow scope of information. And it’s been challenging to deploy them on hypersonic vehicles because the extreme heat caused by high-speed travel causes them to burn up. By changing where sensors are placed — inside the vehicle instead of outside — and using them to track how the vehicle’s physical shape changes, the team can get insights into pressure and force put on the vehicles in real time.

This process — getting a global picture from a variety of sensors and using measurements to infer what is happening — is getting increasing attention across technology industries, said Karen Willcox, director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and a professor of aerospace engineering. But, Willcox said, using the entire vehicle as a sensor takes this to a new level and represents a new way of thinking, applicable to all flight regimes, including hypersonic flight.

“When it comes to things like dynamic sensing onboard a hypersonic vehicle, that way of thinking just hasn’t been explored yet,” Willcox said. “It’s all been focused on the local measurements and how you get a better sensor that can stand the heat.” 

Changes in shape caused by the extreme force generated by the speed of hypersonic flight can knock these vehicles off their trajectory and make them harder to control. By better understanding where deformation occurs, researchers can wield superior control over the vehicles.

The researchers will use scientific machine learning methods to create computationally efficient models of the relationship between the deformations of the vehicles and the force applied during flight.

“Usually, it’s not possible to measure information like surface forces and torques while a vehicle is in flight,” said Jayant Sirohi, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. “This information can be used to validate computer models and to help control the vehicle when it encounters uncertain conditions.”

The NASA university program encourages the participation of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and the UT team is collaborating with Huston-Tillotson University, an Austin-based HBCU with 1,100 undergraduate students.

Huston-Tillotson is working to develop its own engineering program, creating a path to engineering for populations traditionally underrepresented in the industry. The university is made up of approximately 68% Black students and 30% Hispanic students. Today, it offers a pre-engineering program and a partnership with Prairie View A&M, where students go to complete engineering degrees.

Huston-Tillotson will offer a computational engineering course for each of the three years of the hypersonics project to get students ready to work as part of the project team. UT faculty will help with this course, and three to five students will be chosen each year to work on the NASA project.

The students will bring a unique viewpoint to the project based on their background, said Amanda Masino, director of Huston-Tillotson’s STEM Research Scholars program, which provides science, technology, engineering and math majors with research experience and mentoring.

“Assumptions about why work is being done, how data is collected and applied will always be biased by experience,” Masino said. “Having a diverse team with different perspectives ensures that bias in collecting and deploying data is minimized.”

Here’s a look at the roles of some of the other team members:

• The University of Michigan is developing a sophisticated computational model that will be used to understand how the vehicle structures respond to force.
• The University of Texas at San Antonio has a Mach 7 wind tunnel that the team will use to test its technology at high speeds.
• Sandia National Laboratories will provide computer simulations of the flow around the hypersonic vehicles
• Lockheed Martin Corp. will provide technical guidance on hypersonic flight systems

Testing the vehicles using the new sensing paradigm is still a couple of years down the road, researchers say. In the next few months, the main priorities will be designing and building computational and experimental models of hypersonic vehicles and developing the scientific machine learning technology that will help make the inferences about pressure applied to vehicles during flight.