The appointment of
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The Virginia Tech Board of Visitors has conferred the two available, five year Turner Fellowships to Wu Feng of computer science and Shashank Priya of mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering. James and Elizabeth Turner created the Turner Fellowships in 2011 with a $1 million gift, allowing two awards in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering, each with a five-year renewable term. James Turner is a 1956 agricultural engineering alumnus who is the retired president and chief operating officer of General Dynamics. He is also a former rector of the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors. Among his accolades, Feng was named to the Top People to Watch list produced by High Performance Computing Wire. He also unveiled HokieSpeed in December of 2011, a supercomputer with an energy efficiency that makes it the highest ranked commodity supercomputer in the United States on the Green500 list. HokieSpeed was funded by a National Science Foundation $2 million research instrumentation grant awarded to Feng and his colleagues in 2010. Feng also received the first worldwide award for research hoped to “compute a cure for cancer” from the Silicon Valley based technology firm NVIDIA Corporation in 2011. This award is part of the technology firm’s philanthropic “Compute the Cure” program to develop a faster genome analysis platform that will assist researchers in identifying cancerous mutations. Priya is the director of the Center for Energy Harvesting Materials and Systems, a partnership between Virginia Tech and the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the associate director of the Virginia Tech Center for Intelligent Materials Systems and Structures. In 2007 he received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award. In 2011, Priya and Nicholas Thayer, also at Virginia Tech, were credited with developing a robotic hand that is capable of performing human tasks. They called it a dexterous anthropomorphic robotic typing hand or DART. Priya’s focus on energy harvesting allowed him to found the Annual Energy Harvesting Workshop series, focusing on critical subjects related to energy and wireless sensors. Since 2007, Priya has been the principal or co-principal investigator on research grants totaling more than $23 million. |
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