Teaching Excellence Brings Recognition Trio of Top Performers Receive SENG PhD Honors Three faculty members, namely Prof Shenghui Song, Prof Sunghun Kim and Prof Ho Yin Mak, have been honored in the School of Engineering Teaching Excellence Appreciation Award 2012-13, which recognizes continuous excellence in undergraduate teaching, as well as fostering students’ interest in the relevant subjects and the promotion of students’ learning. Prof Song, Electronic and Computer Engineering, received the Distinguished Teaching Award. One particularly special achievement was his development of the new Signal Processing and Communications core course under the four-year curriculum, for which he re-developed all the teaching materials, receiving excellent feedback from students. The School of Engineering (SENG) PhD Research Excellence Awards 2013-14 have been awarded to recipients from three different departments in recognition of their influential contributions to their discipline during their PhD studies at the University. Dr Adetoyese Olajire Oyedun, 2014 graduate of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering with Energy Concentration and a 2010 Hong Kong PhD Fellowship awardee, received the honor for research that has enabled him to propose three different operating strategies to solve the problem of high-energy usage during pyrolysis of solid wastes, such as bamboo and plastics. He has presented his work at five international conferences and published 16 peer-reviewed papers (eight as first author). Prof Kim, Computer Science and Engineering, and Prof Mak, Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management, received Teaching Awards. Prof Kim is using Facebook and Twitter applications to motivate students on the Software Engineering course, as well as encouraging them to publish their projects in the Android Market. Prof Mak has devoted great effort towards providing a motivating and stimulating learning environment with critical thinking in class. He also spends a lot of time outside class communicating with his students. This is not the first time that these three faculty members have been recognized for their teaching and motivation skills. They are all recipients of the student-run HKUST Best Ten Lecturers Awards: Prof Song in 2013, Prof Mak in 2012, and Prof Kim in 2010. 2013 graduate Dr Denis Guangyin Chen, Electronic and Computer Engineering, sought to address the sensing needs of future mobile imaging, sensor networks, and biomedical instrumentation. His work on low-power micro-electronic sensors, compressive imaging, and laser Doppler imaging has produced seven peer-reviewed papers in top journals in his field (five as first author), a US patent, and has been presented at four international conferences. Dr Biao Zhang, 2013 graduate of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, concentrated his research efforts on advanced materials for energy storage devices, including fabrication of metal oxide/nanocarbon composites and their electrochemical performance as electrodes in Li-ion batteries and supercapacitors. He has published 24 peer-reviewed papers, which have been cited around 400 times. Dr Oyedun has become a postdoctoral fellow and Dr Zhang is currently a visiting scholar in their respective departments at HKUST. Dr Chen has been recruited to work as a sensing systems hardware engineer (optical) at Apple Inc’s Cupertino headquarters in California. IN FOCUS 16
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDk5Njg=