Awards
Awards Received by Faculty, Staff and Students
Professor Oana Jurchescu has been named the Baker Family Professor of Physics. The Professorship began on July 1, 2021. Dr. Jurchescu was formerly a Denton Family Fellow. Dr. Jurchescu has been a model teacher scholar since she arrived at Wake Forest in 2009. She has won the Wake Forest University Reid-Doyle Prize for Excellence in Teaching, the WFU Award for Excellence in Research, the Kulynych Family Omicron Delta Kappa Award, and the URECA Award for Excellence in Mentorship in Research and Creative Work. She has brought in almost 10 million dollars in external grant funding to run her world-class research program in organic electronics.
Dr. Jurchescu also received the 2019-20 Graduate School Student Association Faculty Excellence Award. This award is to recognize a graduate school faculty member for his/her service to advance the graduate school program. The recommendation letters for the award were provided by graduate students and focus on the time devoted to interaction with the students, the commitment to the educational process, and excellence in teaching/mentoring.
Ph.D. graduate, Hamna Iqbal, won the 2021 Gordon A. Melson Outstanding PhD Student Award. This is a university award that recognizes performance in research productivity, quality, originality, importance, and impact in the field, along with an outstanding academic record, activity in the discipline and university, and departmental citizenship.
Noah Meyer, a Physics Major who graduated in May 2021 was selected to receive a 2021 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF). The NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recognizes and supports individuals early in their graduate training in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). This highly significant national accomplishment places Noah amongst an elite group of fellows who have gone on to distinguished careers in STEM or STEM education.
The following Awards were presented at our Annual Physics Department Awards Ceremony in May:
Trevor Jenkins, Ryan Sullivan, and Taylor Ordines were co-recipients of the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award
Hamna Iqba and Yan Li were co-recipients of the Outstanding Graduate Research Award
Noah Meyer and Fernando Rigal were co-recipients of the Speas Award
Peer Mentor Award
Kevin Woytowich, Parker Hopkins, Noah Meyer, Parker Cabiness, and Zezhong Zhang were co-recipients of the Major Field Tests Achievement Awards