Three Whiting School of Engineering affiliates are inaugural winners of the Mark O. Robbins Prize in High Performance Computing and the Robbins Future Faculty Award, established last year to honor the legacy of renowned condensed matter and statistical physicist Mark O. Robbins, who died in 2020.
A professor in Hopkins' Department of Physics and Astronomy for more than three decades, Robbins was integral to supporting the development of computational facilities at JHU and served as associate director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science, where he coordinated computing efforts.
The computing awards will be awarded annually to two doctoral candidates who exemplify Robbins' legacy through outstanding achievement in high-performance computing. The future faculty award, also to be awarded annually, recognizes postdocs.
The inaugural winners of the Mark O. Robbins Prize in High Performance Computing are Karthik Menon, a doctoral candidate and member of Rajat Mittal's lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Andrew Ruttinger, a doctoral candidate and a member of Paulette Clancy's lab in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
Menon's research focuses on the development of computational and data-driven techniques to study the interaction of fluids with flexible and moving surfaces within liquid flows. Ruttinger focuses on using computational modeling to develop insights into quantum dot photovoltaics, lithium extraction from low-concentration sources, and the development of thermal energy storage.
Winner of the Robbins Future Faculty Award is postdoc Sai Pooja Mahajan, who focuses on developing and applying computational techniques aimed at solving complex problems in computational lithography and computational protein structure, function, and design. She is a member of Jeffrey Gray's lab in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
All three winners received cash prizes and plaques and will be invited to present their work at a virtual High Performance Computing symposium to be held in August.
The Robbins Prize is sponsored by the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science, the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
