2022 Joachim and Yuko Heberlein Award Winner

ME PhD student Taaresh Sanjeev Taneja is this year's recipient of the Joachim and Yuko Heberlein Award. The Heberlein Award was created in honor of Department of Mechanical Engineering Professor Emeritus Joachim Heberlein in celebration of his lasting legacy of teaching and research. Professor Heberlein believed strongly in the value of extracurricular learning experiences and wanted to help by enhancing the student experience, while enabling opportunities for international exposure.

Taneja is a PhD student in Suo Yang's Computational Reactive Flow and Energy Lab. He used the award funding to attend the AIAA SciTech 2022 Conference to present his work, "Comparing Low-Mach and Fully-Compressible CFD Solvers for Phenomenological Modeling of Nanosecond Pulsed Plasma Discharges With and Without Turbulence."

How the Heberlein Award has impacted Taneja's research and career:

"AIAA SciTech is the biggest conference in the aerospace community in the US. I not only got a chance to present my own work and attend talks relevant to my research focus, but also attended talks from other close areas that helped me gain more ideas for my own research. Plenary talks and invited talks by distinguished researchers in the community were especially very beneficial. I also got a chance to network with several other grad students, professors and industry/national lab experts which is very crucial for my career. This was the first conference that I got to attend in person after beginning my PhD in fall 2019, so it was an even more special experience. We were able to successfully establish a collaboration with the Air Force Research Lab, very recently, after I attended a talk by them and exchanged ideas with them and with my advisor. This has given a new project for me to pursue, which I am very excited about. Thanks to the Heberlein Award, I was able to have a fruitful trip to San Diego which resulted in many such positive outcomes." — Taaresh Sanjeev Taneja