Meet the Outstanding Faculty Award Recipients of 2024 (2024)

Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award

Angelique Louie, Biomedical Engineering

Angelique Louie's passion for education has left an indelible mark on the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

It is because of her pioneering work that the department's undergraduate senior design series focuses on training through translational design, offering students the opportunity to solve real-world problems from institutions like the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. Louie has also created several keystone courses for the undergraduate program and has developed classes meant to foster student success, such as one for freshmen and sophom*ores interested in undergraduate research.

Her dedication to teaching has led to several leadership positions. Louie served as the faculty director of the Undergraduate Research Center from 2013–16 and provided critical support for the university, receiving high-profile awards like the Beckman Scholars Program from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. It was also due to her spearheading efforts that the Department of Biomedical Engineering received the first ABET accreditation for its undergraduate program, which ensures graduates have the requisite skills to enter the global workforce.

Louie joined UC Davis in 2002. She received her bachelor's in electrical engineering from UC Davis and holds a master's in electrical engineering from UCLA and a Ph.D. in cell biology from UC Irvine.

Outstanding Junior Faculty Award

Scott J. McCormack, Materials Science and Engineering

An expert in high-temperature ceramics, Scott McCormack joined the college in 2019, where he applies his skills in materials synthesis, crystallography and calorimetry for the discovery of new materials that can withstand the harshest conditions, like ultra-high temperatures, for applications in hypersonic platforms, space exploration and nuclear fission and fusion reactors.

To experiment on materials at temperatures up to 4,000 degrees Celsius, McCormack designed an environmental conical nozzle levitator with dual-wavelength lasers to study ultra-high temperature materials and ceramics in a controlled, container-free environment.

McCormack is currently involved in two projects funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. He is the lead PI on a congressionally funded program that focuses on using ultra-high-temperature ceramics for hypersonic platform manufacturing. He also serves as co-PI on a project supported through the office's Multi-University Research Initiative, which focuses on investigating compositionally complex ceramics for hypersonic platforms.

McCormack earned his bachelor's degree in materials engineering from the University of Wollongong in Australia and his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2021 and an Excellence in Teaching Award from the UC Davis College of Engineering in 2023.

Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Award

Vladimir Filkov, Computer Science

Vladimir Filkov turns working with data into an art form by seeing what is possible within the details. A consummate data scientist, Filkov has been applying data science, AI and machine learning methods to several areas including software engineering, life sciences and, most recently, medicine.

Since arriving at UC Davis in 2002, his contributions have been recognized many times over, including five Distinguished Paper Awards and two Test of Time Awards from the Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering. The latter honors were for his formative papers on the community structure within open-source software projects and the potential impact of biased datasets on the performance of prediction techniques of bug-detection software.

As the director of translational data science for the UC Davis DataLab, Filkov oversees projects and programs that build data science bridges with UC Davis Health. In one such project with UC Davis doctors, he and his team developed and deployed a model of patient admissions during the pandemic, used daily by nurses and doctors to anticipate resource needs.

Filkov received his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science at Stony Brook University. He was named an ACM Distinguished Member in 2020.

Outstanding Senior Faculty Award

Chen-Nee Chuah, Electrical and Computer Engineering

A global leader in communication networks and data science, Chen-Nee Chuah has published over 240 refereed papers on networking, cybersecurity and machine learning. Her significant contributions include the development of Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output wireless systems (resulting in Wi-Fi networks dozens of times faster than previous models) and large-scale internet measurement techniques. Recently, Chuah has focused on leveraging smart devices and edge intelligence to improve on- and off-site medical care.

Chuah has led or co-led 19 NSF, NIH and DoD funded projects, including a recent NSF TRIPOD award that has helped establish UC Davis as a data science hub, as well as grants through the UC Noyce Initiative to advance cybersecurity and computational health. She has also received the UC Davis ADVANCE award for her commitment to increasing opportunities for women in engineering and computer science and recently became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Before joining UC Davis in 2002, Chuah earned her Ph.D. and master's from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. She is the first woman to hold the title of Child Family Endowed Professorship in Engineering, a distinction she received for her nationally recognized scholarship.