Four professors from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering are recipients of 2021 Faculty Excellence Awards from Purdue University’s College of Engineering. The awards recognize, encourage and promote outstanding contributions of faculty within the College and Purdue.

Michael D. Zoltowski, the Thomas J. and Wendy Engibous Professor of ECE, is the recipient of the Dean A.A. Potter Undergraduate Teaching Award. The award honors faculty members for outstanding teaching performance in all phases of the College of Engineering's undergraduate instruction on the West Lafayette campus. Zoltowski was recognized for his well-established track record of teaching excellence and pioneering course development, including the world’s first senior digital signal processing course covering advanced image processing.

ECE student Hannah Paul says Zoltowski is able to connect with students and help them understand why they are learning things and where they can apply it in the future.

“He always makes the lectures very entertaining. He always tries to connect with the students, as well,” says Paul. “Never before have I seen professors who care about their students as much as Prof. Z.”

Milind Kulkarni, professor of electrical and computer engineering, is the recipient of the Online Education Award. This recognizes faculty for excellence in course development and pedagogy of a digital education course. Kulkarni was honored “for the development of highly successful online courses for ECE’s degree partnership with edX and the College of Engineering’s digital badge course series in Data Science.”

“Milind’s experience and dedication in all of his efforts have really been invaluable in developing a lot of materials that now have become part of our “How To” guide for engineering faculty members who also teach in the online space,” says Dimitrios Peroulis, the Michael and Katherine Birck Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Reilly Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Gerhard Klimeck, professor of electrical and computer engineering, is the recipient of the Impact on Industry Award, which recognizes faculty for excellence in research that has had a significant translation impact in industry in the past 5 years. Klimeck is also the Director of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology and Reilly Director of the Center for Predictive Materials and Devices. He’s was honored with this award for leading the development of the Nanoelectronic Modeling (NEMO) tools suite, a major staple in the technical computer aided design world enabling top-tier semiconductor companies to do path-finding research for the next generation of transistor technology.

“Gerhard has been the driving force behind nanoHUB for almost 20 years now,” says Mark Lundstrom, the Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “He brought to that effort a commitment to engaging industry and working engineers.”

Shreyas Sen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, is the recipient of the Early Career Research Award, which recognizes faculty for early career research excellence. Sen was honored for his invention, Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication, which is opening new possibilities for secure, low power communication around the body, and leading to major innovations in connected health care, human-computer interaction, and brain machine interfaces.

“I’m really delighted that Shreyas won the Early Career Research Award,” says Kaushik Roy, the Edward G. Tiedemann Jr. Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Shreyas joined Purdue after five very fruitful years at Intel. When he joined Purdue he really adapted very well, making several seminal contributions, one of them being in the area of Human Body Communications, where you use the human body as a wire for secure communication.”