Graduate Students Win Top Two SPIE Conference Awards

ME graduate students Ryan Hahnlen and Surya Chakrabarti won first and second place respectively in the Best Student Paper and Presentation Competition held at the 2011 International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) Conference on Smart Structures and Non-Destructive Evaluation (SS/NDE). The conference, which both Hahnlen and Chakrabarti attended, took place in San Diego, California on March 6-11, 2011.

Ryan Hahnlen, a PhD student working on smart composites was awarded the first-place prize for his paper titled, “Performance and Modeling of Active Metal-Matrix Composites Manufactured by Ultrasonic Additive Manufacturing.” Surya Chakrabarti, a PhD candidate researching magnetostrictive materials received the competition's second-place award for his paper on “3D Dynamic Finite Element Model for Magnetostrictive Galfenol-based Devices.” Both students are advised by Ohio State Professor Marcelo Dapino.

Five finalist papers were selected from the overall pool of student applicants. The five finalists competed in an oral presentation session at the conference on March 9. The overall winner, second-place, third-place, and honorable mentions were announced at the conference’s plenary session on March 11. A total of 968 paper submissions were presented at this year's conference. The SPIE SS/NDE conference is a multidisciplinary forum that advances research in adaptive structures and mechanisms, smart sensors, NDE, civil infrastructure, aerospace systems, and energy harvesting. 

The mechanical and aerospace engineering department congratulates Ryan Hahnlen and Surya Chakrabarti for their academic excellence, and for their impressive performance at this year’s SPIE/ASME best student paper and presentation competition.