UMD's 40th Annual Convocation Honors Engineering Staff, Faculty

The University of Maryland’s 40th annual Convocation will honor 33 faculty and staff—including four from the A. James Clark School of Engineering—for their contributions to education, research, and the campus community.

The ceremony will be held Wednesday, September 13 at 2 p.m. at Memorial Chapel (7600 Baltimore Avenue, College Park, MD 20740). In an academic setting, convocation is a time for the university community to gather, officially usher in the academic year, and celebrate achievements across the campus. Academic and service honorees, selected by their peers, wear robes and caps befitting the formal tone of the occasion, as would professors during commencement ceremonies. The word convocation is taken from the Latin words com (meaning together) and vocare (to call).

Maryland Engineering’s 2023 honorees

	Director of Global Engineering Leadership Ramsey Jabaji Honored with: President's Distinguished Service Award Jabaji began working at UMD in 2005 and joined the Office of Global Engineering Leadership in 2011; as director since 2020, he has more than doubled the number of Terp engineers studying abroad. While engineering students have traditionally been limited in their study abroad options because of the program’s highly structured curriculum, Jabaji worked with advising staff and faculty to curate approved course packages at universities in Singapore, Denmark, Australia, and more; he also developed the Clark in Madrid program in 2017, which offers 40 engineering courses across two Spanish universities, drawing more than 120 participants last school year. Today, 30 percent of engineering students graduate with study abroad experience (the highest rate of any school or college at UMD). Jabaji additionally piloted the ClarkLEAD program in 2018, now part of UMD’s TerrapinSTRONG initiative, which discusses issues of identity and the importance of having teams with different backgrounds tackle society’s grand challenges. To expand that work, he adapted the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s Intergroup Dialogues course for engineering, and joined a committee to help expand these efforts across campus.
	Professor and Center Director Liangbing Hu Honored as: Distinguished University Professor Hu, who is the Herbert Rabin Distinguished Professor, has published some 400 research papers, including 10 papers in the prestigious Science and Nature journals. He has received a number of honors for his work, including the Highly Cited Researchers list by Clarivate Analytics (2016–2023); Blavatnik National Awards Honoree; TAPPI Nano Middle Career Award (2019); R&D 100 Winners (2018, 2020–2022); Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2016); University of Maryland Invention of the Year (2019, 2014, 2022); and Air Force Young Investigator Award (2013). He is the director of Center for Materials Innovation in the Clark School and has co-founded multiple startups at UMD, including InventWood Inc., HighT-Tech Inc., and WH-Power Inc. His research group focuses on materials innovations, device integrations, and manufacturing in general with ongoing research activities on wood nanotechnologies, 3000 K extreme materials, and beyond Li-ion batteries. Hu is a fellow of the Materials Research Society.
	Professor and Department Chair Sennur Ulukus Honored as: Distinguished University Professor Ulukus is the first woman faculty member from engineering to be named a Distinguished University Professor. Since joining Maryland in 2001, she has been named a UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, received the named Anthony Ephremides Professorship in Information Sciences and Systems, served as the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)’s associate chair for graduate studies, and co-founded the Professional Masters Program in Machine Learning; since 2022, she has served as chair of ECE. Ulukus has been honored with an IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications, NSF CAREER Award, IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award, IEEE Communications Society Women in Communications Engineering Outstanding Achievement Award, and IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Green Communications and Computing Distinguished Technical Achievement Recognition Award. She is a Fellow of IEEE.
	Professor Don DeVoe Honored as: Distinguished Scholar-Teacher DeVoe is a Wilson H. Elkins Professor and associate chair of research and administration in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; he holds affiliate appointments in the Department of Bioengineering and Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and is a core faculty member of the Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 with a focus on microsystems technology. His current research interests include microfluidic systems for applications in nucleic acid diagnostics, cancer immunology, liposomal nanomedicines, and aerobiology. DeVoe is a recipient of the 2013 University System of Maryland Regents Award for Research, was named a 2008 Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, and was recognized with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the National Science Foundation in 2000 for advances in microsystems technology. He recently served as a senior editor for the IEEE/ASME Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, and as treasurer for the Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).