2025 Tandon Faculty Awards

At Tandon, we take the time each year to honor exemplary faculty members for their teaching skill, dedication to their students, and commitment to our school.

Excellence in Research Award

The Excellence in Research Award — which is given annually to senior faculty in recognition of significant and sustained research accomplishments — went to the following faculty:

Kaan Ozbay (CUE, C2SMARTER, CUSP) has profoundly advanced our understanding of complex urban mobility challenges. His innovative contributions to areas like traffic modeling, incident management, and the application of AI in smart cities have demonstrably and fundamentally shaped the future of urban transportation.

 

Theodore (Ted) S. Rappaport (ECE, NYU WIRELESS) has conducted groundbreaking research that has been instrumental in shaping the landscape of modern wireless communications, particularly in demonstrating the viability of millimeter-wave technology for 5G and beyond. His profound contributions to radio propagation, channel modeling, smart antennas and beamforming, and wireless system design have not only set foundational principles, but also continue to drive innovation across the telecommunications industry.

 

Junior Faculty Research Award

Assistant Professor Daniel Vignon (CUE, C2SMART) is the winner of this year’s Junior Faculty Research Award, presented to a tenure-track Assistant Professor to honor their notable research accomplishments, as demonstrated by publications in top-tier venues, funded research proposals, student mentoring, and recognition by professional societies. Daniel’s work informs the design, regulation, and operations of emerging mobility services, and he is helping make NYU Tandon an ever-more-important hub of transportation-related research.

Distinguished Teacher Award

Industry Assistant Professor Nikita Grigoryev (CBE) received this year’s Distinguished Teacher Award, which is bestowed upon someone who has demonstrated sustained excellence in teaching during their time at Tandon and is considered the school’s premier teaching award. The honor recognizes the consistently positive feedback he receives from those in his courses, his high instructor evaluations, the mentoring he enthusiastically provides to students at all levels, and his tireless efforts to improve every aspect of the Tandon experience. His research is boosting the ability of clinicians to treat deadly cancers, and he is inspiring his students to do equally important work.
 

Jacobs Excellence in Education Innovation Award

The Jacobs Excellence in Education Award, aimed at recognizing and fostering innovation and excellence in teaching, went to Associate Professor Rose Faghih (BME, CUSP), in honor of her unwavering commitment to teaching and her development of inclusive and interactional strategies. Rose has developed pioneering algorithms for next-generation wearable technologies, and she’s helping educate a pioneering new generation of biomedical engineers.
 

Inclusive Excellence Award for Faculty

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hénaff (TCS, CUSP, C2SMARTER) received the Inclusive Excellence Award for Faculty. The award was established to honor a Tandon faculty member who demonstrates inclusive leadership and manifests the ideals of diversity, belonging, and equity through research and scholarship, creative work, teaching, mentoring, and service. Elizabeth emphasizes the social and environmental implications of the topics she covers to her students–contextualization that is crucial to understanding the broader impact of their education, innovation, and future endeavors.
 

Dean's Award for Excellence in Online Education

Associate Professor Rakesh Behera (MAE) received the Dean's Award for Excellence in Online Education, given to instructors who have demonstrated excellence through personal commitment to students and the development and delivery of innovative online education material. Rakesh’s students have high praise for his accessibility and patience, as well as his use of active-learning techniques and real-life examples, even in online deliberation.
 

Honorary Titles

The following faculty have earned the rank of Institute Associate Professor. That title is bestowed in recognition of their significant accomplishments in research, teaching, and service, and the expectation that they will become leaders in their professional fields.

David Fouhey (ECE and Courant) creates AI systems that build representations of the underlying state and dynamics of the world by observing it, and his work has applications in a wide range of sectors, including astronomy, ecology, medicine, and robotics. Among his recent research accomplishments is the development of an AI system for analyzing bird skeletons quickly and accurately — a boon to ornithologists studying evolution and other topics — and earlier this year, he organized a NYC Computer Vision Day event that drew hundreds of scholars from around the region to Tandon.

Christopher Musco (CSE, VIDA) focuses on the algorithmic foundations of data science and machine learning; his overall aim is to democratize big-data processing by developing new algorithms capable of efficiently processing the world’s largest datasets without the need for the world's largest supercomputers. A former recipient of a Junior Faculty Research Award, he also holds an NSF CAREER Award supporting his work on a powerful algorithmic technique known as “matrix sketching,” the purpose of which is to quickly compress a large dataset (represented as a matrix of numbers) down to its most essential information by eliminating redundancy and noise.