Engineering Dean Nancy Allbritton announced that two NanoES engineers received the 2020 College of Engineering Awards for research: Materials Science & Engineering professor Miqin Zhang received the faculty award and Shane Colburn, a PhD student in Arka Majumdar’s lab, received the student award.
Awarded annually, the College of Engineering Awards acknowledge the extraordinary efforts of the College’s teaching and research assistants, staff, and faculty members.
Faculty Award: Research
Miqin Zhang
Kyocera Professor
Materials Science & Engineering
Miqin Zhang is an expert at applying materials science principles to biology and medicine. She joined MSE in 1999 and holds positions in the School of Medicine and in Radiology, Bioengineering, and Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine. Miqin has become an internationally recognized authority in the areas of nanotechnology for cancer diagnosis and therapy, biomaterials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, 3D natural polymer-based matrices for cancer research and drug discovery, and biosensors for chemical and biological agent detection and drug screening. “The success of all her research programs demonstrates her ability to identify meaningful yet feasible research projects, and quickly expand knowledge base, and apply new knowledge to a new field.” Miqin has published more than 180 journal articles, holds 14 patents, co-founded two startup companies and has raised more than $20 million for research as a PI. She has successfully mentored 250 undergraduate students, 18 Ph. D. students and 12 postdoctoral/medical associates.
Student Award: Research
Shane Colburn
Research Assistant
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Shane Colburn is a double Husky, earning B.S. degrees in electrical engineering and physics from the UW in 2015 and now working on his Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering. His research focuses on novel approaches for white-light imaging with compact metasurface optics, which have the promise of enabling compact optics for a wide variety of imaging applications across the consumer and defense spectrum. Shane discovered a way to circumvent one of the main problems in metasurface optics, and recently published this work in the prestigious journal Science Advances. Shane interned twice at Facebook Reality Labs as well as at Google X, where he has collaborated with senior researchers and engineers across several different groups on multiple projects. “He is very good at connecting concepts from different fields to come up with solutions.” An extremely productive graduate student, Shane has 17 journal publications and his work has been cited more than 420 times.