Philippe Fauchet, Bruce and Bridgitt Evans Dean of Engineering, has announced outstanding 2022 engineering graduates, school and department award recipients.
Shubham Gulati of Edmond, Oklahoma, is Founder’s Medalist for the School of Engineering. Long Viet Than of Hanoi, Vietnam, will lead 2022 engineering undergraduates to their Commencement seats as the School of Engineering’s Banner Bearer. Zach Bloom of Silver Lake, Ohio, is the Master of Engineering Banner Bearer. Blythe Glory Dewling of Hoboken, New Jersey, has received the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Service, which is awarded to a graduating senior with remarkable leadership qualities and who also has made the greatest contributions in personal service to the school.
Gulati is completing an accelerated dual degree—bachelor of engineering and master’s degree—in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He has received numerous awards and honors including The John T. and Lizzie Allen McGill First Year Award, a Casey Carter Bonar Award, the Chancellor’s Diversity Award, and an Alpha Eta Mu Beta Travel Award. He is a member of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi and a Vanderbilt Chancellor’s Scholar.
Gulati has conducted research in Professor Craig Duvall’s Advanced Therapeutics Laboratory focused on designing and optimizing novel drug delivery platforms, particularly for osteoarthritis. It was this work that ignited his desire to use engineering skills to improve patient lives.
His service activities include co-founder and co-president of oVRcome, current president of finance and former executive president, president of student affairs, and General Executive Board Member of the Engineering Council; current senior advisor and former treasurer, special events chair, and first-year representative of the South Asian Cultural Exchange; and former co-president and outreach chair of Engineering World Health.
Especially meaningful to Gulati is the founding of oVRcome in the spring of his freshman year. Student volunteers take virtual reality (VR) headsets to patients receiving infusion treatment at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. “Patients I interacted with enjoyed the VR experiences. I was content that there was something I could do as an undergraduate to make the difficult infusion treatments a little bit fun,” Gulati said. “These volunteering sessions have bolstered my desire to pursue medicine.”
Gulati will enter the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in the fall. As a physician, he hopes to remain involved with innovative drug delivery and development research.
The Founder’s Medal was endowed by Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and signifies first honors for each graduating class from Vanderbilt’s schools. The gold medal has been awarded since 1877. The recipient is named by the dean after consideration of faculty recommendations as well as grade point averages of the year’s summa cum laude graduates.
Than of Hanoi, Vietnam, has the honor of leading engineering undergraduates to their Commencement seats. The distinction of Banner Bearer is awarded to the senior engineering student who has been judged by the faculty of the School of Engineering to have excelled in all aspects of his or her undergraduate career.
Than is graduating with a bachelor of engineering degree in chemical engineering. Than has served as a research assistant in Professor Kane Jennings’ lab where he conducted independent research on designing a composite protein film that can convert solar energy into electricity using a protein extracted directly from commercial spinach leaves to perform light capture, harnessing the power of photosynthesis itself. His summer research experience and his honors thesis are both parts of this project.
Than has received a Professor’s Award for Distinguished Sophomore and the William Ma Award for the Outstanding Junior in chemical and biomolecular engineering. He also was a Littlejohn Summer Research Scholar in 2021.
Than has served as treasurer for the Vanderbilt chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineering since fall 2019. He has been a volunteer for Vanderbilt Student Volunteers for Science and a member of the Vanderbilt chapter of Engineers Without Borders.
An Alternative Winter Break trip to North Carolina in 2019 has been a highlight of Than’s Vanderbilt experience as an undergraduate. “We planted grasses to stabilize sand dunes, collected oyster shells to build artificial reefs, cleaned up a local state park, and learned a lot about nature conservation at a coastal area,” Than said. “I wanted to study chemical engineering to find ways to reduce society’s environmental impact from an industrial point of view. During this service trip, I got a chance to not only make my own impact but also see how the problem can be addressed from another perspective.”
This fall, Than will enter the Ph.D. program in chemical engineering at Stanford University.
The Master of Engineering Banner Bearer is an honor bestowed on the master’s graduate with the highest scholastic achievement. The recipient is judged by the faculty to have excelled in all aspects of the graduate career and is considered an outstanding example of a professional engineering student. Bloom, of Silver Lake, Ohio, is graduating with a master’s degree in environmental engineering. As a Vanderbilt undergraduate, he was the recipient of the Greg A. Andrews Memorial Award in Civil Engineering. His M.Eng design project was evaluating the possible use of an active quarry for emergency stormwater control. Bloom plans to seek work in the field of water resources engineering.
Dewling has received the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Service, which is given to the graduating senior who has shown remarkable leadership qualities and who also has made the greatest contributions in personal service to the school. Dewling is graduating with a degree in civil engineering.
Throughout her four years at Vanderbilt, Dewling has worked to promote a sense of community among female students in the School of Engineering and promote STEM fields to young women in the Nashville community.
Dewling was elected to serve as the first-year representative in the Society of Women Engineers. Her efforts to lead community service events at the Nashville YWCA led to an appointment as SWE’s Community Service Chair the following year. In that role, she planned multiple events with Girls Inc., a nonprofit that provides elementary and middle school girls an opportunity to participate in STEM-based extracurricular activities.
As a junior, Dewling was elected the vice president of SWE. That year, she also began working as a V-squared mentor and as a peer facilitator for the School of Engineering’s Summer Book Club and she remains a resource for former mentees from those groups. In her senior year, she was elected president of SWE and has led that group during a period of growth.
Dewling’s reputation as a mentor to younger students, especially to female students, led her to be asked by a civil engineering first-year adviser to reach out to advisees who needed additional support and community during the isolation caused by Vanderbilt’s COVID restrictions during the Fall 2020 semester–a role she willingly and ably accepted.
Throughout her time at Vanderbilt, Dewling also has been active in Engineers without Borders, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Students Promoting Environmental Awareness and Responsibility, or SPEAR. After graduation, she will be a business analyst at McKinsey and Company.
Dean Fauchet will announce the 21 students who achieved summa cum laude distinction:
Yiting Chen
Garrett Thomas Crumb
Kaleab Solomon Gebremichael
Shubham Gulati
Manasvi Reddy Gunnala
Aadarsh Jha
Caroline Margaret Kessell
Megan Sadie Krueger
Nicholas Vincent Laning
Kristi Maisha
Raahul Natarrajan
Riya Valmiki Patel
Long Viet Than
Shiliang Tian
Sean Jeffrey Tuttle
Yuzhe Wang
Rong Wang
Charles Wang
Dominick Yao Xu
Jiachen Xu
Fan Xue
Program awards go to seniors who, in the opinion of the program faculty, made the greatest progress in professional development during their undergraduate careers. The 2022 recipients are:
Biomedical Engineering: Fan Xue, Nanjing, China
Chemical Engineering: Long Viet Than, Hanoi, Vietnam
Civil Engineering: Nicholas Vincent Laning, Barrington, Illinois
Computer Engineering: Bohan Jiang, Qingdao, China
Computer Science: Rong Wang, Owens Cross Roads, Alabama
Electrical Engineering: Yuxuan Shi, Tianjin, China
Engineering Science: Megan Sadie Krueger, Concord, Mass.
Mechanical Engineering: Jeongwoo Seo, Coralville, Iowa
Kevin Joseph Gomez, Nashville, Tennessee, received the Wilson and Nellie Pyle Miser Award, which is given to the senior who has excelled in all aspects of mathematics during the student’s undergraduate career.
Nicholas Vincent Laning, Barrington, Illinois, received the Stein Stone Memorial Award, which is given to a senior who has earned a letter in sports and who is judged to have made the most satisfactory scholastic and extra-mural progress as an undergraduate.
Other awards and honors
Lucas Scott Mowery, Costa Mesa, California, is the recipient of the American Institute of Chemists Award, given on the basis of leadership, ability, character, scholastic achievement and potential for advancement in the chemical professions.
The Greg A. Andrews Civil Engineering Memorial Award goes to an exemplary senior who plans to do graduate work in environmental and water resources engineering. The award is shared by Tobias Dillon Houghton and Kristi Maisha, both of Nashville, Tennessee.
The Thomas G. Arnold Prizes for Biomedical Engineering Systems Design and Research is shared by Lucy Sammis Britto, Franklin, Tennessee., for research; and by Andrew David Gnegy, Vienna, West Virginia; Kevin Michael Oswald, McKinney, Texas; Isabella Richter, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania; and Christina Elizabeth Sundt, Red Bank, New Jersey, for design.
The ASCE/Dan Barge, Jr. Award in Civil Engineering is given to an outstanding third-year student majoring in civil engineering. The recipient is Arman Moazampour, Bayonne, New Jersey.
The C. F. Chen Best Design Award for the best design project in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is shared by Sebastian Alexander Bond, Ethan Hunter Mayer, Kellen McKenzie Lively, Abdul-Latif Gbadamoshie, and Kai Devon Malcolm for the project: Modular Payload System for Autonomous Vehicle Location Tracking.
The Walter C. Criley Prize is awarded for the best paper written on an advanced senior project in electrical engineering. The recipient is Alexandra Feeley Lamb, New York, N.Y., for the project: Automated Interior Painting System.
The Arthur J. Dyer Jr. Memorial Prize is awarded to a senior who has done the best work in the study and/or design in use of structural steel, and who is a member of the American Society for Civil Engineers. The recipient is Crystal Cheng, Baltimore, Maryland.
The Walter Gill Kirkpatrick Prize in Civil Engineering is given to the most deserving third-year student majoring in civil engineering. The recipient is Christopher Schaefer Keller, Sewickley, Pennsylvania.
The William A. Ma Award is given to an outstanding senior majoring in chemical engineering on the basis of a demonstrated record of leadership and scholastic achievement. The recipient is Kate Alexandra Johnson, Tomball, Texas.
The Robert D. Tanner Undergraduate Research Award is given to a senior who has conducted the best undergraduate research project in chemical engineering. The recipient is Long Viet Than, Hanoi, Vietnam.
The W. Dennis Threadgill Award is given for outstanding achievement in chemical engineering in honor of a former faculty member and department chair. The award is shared by Lynn Lee, Duluth, Georgia, and Riya Valmiki Patel, Chandler, Arizona.
The Computer Science Design Prize presented by FortyAU is given by software development company FortyAU for outstanding achievement in originality, robustness and impactfulness of software design. The award is shared by Marco Georgaklis, Brookline, Massachusetts, and Noah Knox, Starkville, Mississippi.
Class of 2022 members of Tau Beta Pi engineering scholastic fraternity
Blythe Glory Dewling, Hoboken, New Jersey
Andrew David Gnegy, Vienna, West Virginia
Shubham Gulati, Edmond, Oklahoma
Katherine Elizabeth Helman, Annandale, Virginia.
Aadarsh Jha, Austin, Texas
Kate Alexandra Johnson, Tomball, Texas
Caroline Margaret Kessell, Doylestown, Pennsylvania
Ashwin Kumar, Irving, Texas
Lucas Ryan McBride, Oakland Gardens, New York
Lucas Scott Mowery, Costa Mesa, California
Ashmita Rajkumar, Sunnyvale, California
Nathaniel James Sifuentes, Curtice, Ohio
Eleanor Todd Summerfield, Louisville, Kentucky
Sean Jeffrey Tuttle, Clancy, Montana
Zhirou Yue, Brooklyn, New York
Contact: Brenda Ellis, 615 343-6314
brenda.ellis@vanderbilt.edu