The scholarship of two recent GT-AE doctoral graduates, Nuno Filipe and Vrishank Raghav, has been recognized by Sigma Xi, the international honor society of science and engineering. 

Raghav, a former student of  Dr. Narayanan Komerath, was recognized for his dissertation,  Radial Flow Effects on a Retreating Rotor Blade.  He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Cardiovascular Fluid Mechanics Laboratory directed by Prof. Yoganathan in the Department of Biomedical Engineering  at Georgia Tech.

While a student at GT-AE, Filipe worked under the guidance of Dr. Panagiotis Tsiotras. Sigma Xi recognized the research presented in his GT-AE dissertation, entitled, "Nonlinear Pose Control and Estimation for Space Proximity Operations: An Approach Based on Dual  Quaternions."

Filipe is now employed as navigation engineer for the Guidance and Control Analysis Group of the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

This is the fourth time that a former student of Dr. Komerath has received the Sigma Xi Outstanding PhD Thesis honor. Previous awardees included Dr. Phillip A. Fawcett (1993), Dr. JaiMoo Kim (1994) and Dr. Leigh Ann Darden (1999).

"I am proud of the great minds I've been able to mentor, but I am also proud for the School. To me, there is no better confirmation that we at Georgia Tech produce excellence," said Komerath, upon hearing the news.

"This is an award won on merit, as determined by a very objective team of experts from across the Institute.These are, by definition, the very best 1.5 percent of our graduates."

For almost 70 years, the Georgia Tech Chapter of Sigma Xi has honored  faculty and students for their research with annual awards. The thesis awards recognize the top ten dissertations, selected from among all of the roughly 700 doctorates awarded annually by the Institute. The Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Research Awards are made possible by the support of the Georgia Tech Research Corporation and the Ferst Foundation.

Prior to the 2015 awards, the most recent GT-AE faculty or student to be recognized with a Sigma Xi award was Dr. Dewey Hodges, the recipient of the much-coveted 2011 Sustained Research Award.

Review the entire list of 2015 Sigma XI awardees.