This year’s recipients are graduate students Christopher Dodson and Bahman Zohour, and current undergraduate Brett T. Lopez, who will receive his bachelor’s degree in June. Brief profiles of the three students are below.
In addition, seven recent UCLA Engineering alumni, now in graduate school at other universities, received the NSF Fellowship this month: Jacob Borrajo, Karina Chavarria, Fernando Garcia, Stefan Jorgensen, Lindsey Sharpe, Jennifer Smolke and Justin Wong.
The fellowship program, which offers three years of financial support, “recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.”
Christopher Dodson, Aerospace Engineering
Graduate Advisor: Professor Richard Wirz
Research focus: Plasma-material interactions of micro-engineered materials for electric propulsion and pulsed power.
Undergraduate institution and degree: Ohio University, B.S. in mechanical engineering
Brett T. Lopez, Aerospace Engineering
Undergraduate Advisor: Professor Ann R. Karagozian
Current research focus: Understand and quantify acoustically coupled combustion characteristics of a range of condensed fuels.
Future research focus: Autonomous systems and control design for aircraft, spacecraft and ground vehicles.
Future graduate institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Bahman Zohour, Chemical Engineering
Graduate Advisor: Professor Selim Senkan
Research focus: Systematically develop and validate detail chemical kinetics mechanism (DCKM) modeling for heterogeneous nanofiber catalytic systems of partial oxidation reactions.
Undergraduate institution and degree: UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, B.S. in chemical engineering