Drexel University's College of Engineering is proud to announce the recipients of the 2025-26 Longsview Fellowships, Carleone Faculty Awards and Grimes Family Faculty Awards. These prestigious awards recognize outstanding faculty research initiatives that align with the university's strategic goals, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation in engineering and related fields.
These programs support tenure-track or tenured faculty members engaged in high-quality scholarship, technology commercialization and research that secures extramural funding from agencies such as the NIH, DOD and NSF. Each award supports faculty research that aligns with Drexel’s commitment to advancing knowledge, fostering collaboration and addressing pressing societal challenges through innovative engineering solutions.
Longsview Fellowships
The Longsview Fellowship focuses on fostering interdisciplinary research collaborations at the intersections of Drexel researchers’ expertise. This program particularly emphasizes projects that bring together engineering, computing and biomedical investigators to advance high-impact research.
This year’s Longsview Fellowship recipients and their projects are:
- “Automated façade-level material detection to advance urban material stock and flow analysis”
Principal Investigator: Fernanda Campos da Cruz Rios, PhD (Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering)
Co-Investigator: Feng Liu, PhD (College of Computing & Informatics)
- “Generative AI for Organic Crystal Structure Prediction Conditioned on Molecular Structure and Process Conditions”
Principal Investigator: Matthew McDonald, PhD (Chemical and Biological Engineering)
Co-Investigator: Feng Liu, PhD (College of Computing & Informatics)
- “Advancing Decentralized Climate Adaptation Through Real-Time, Place-Based Collaboration”
Principal Investigator: Franco Montalto, PhD (Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering)
Co-Investigator: Paul Brandt-Rauf, PhD (School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems)
- “AI-Guided Discovery and Synthesis of Surface-Modified MXenes”
Principal Investigator: Matthew Stamm, PhD (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Co-Investigators: Masoud Soroush, PhD (Chemical and Biological Engineering); Rosina Weber, PhD (College of Computing & Informatics)
Carleone Faculty Awards
The Carleone Faculty Award supports feasibility studies for high-risk, high-reward research ideas, particularly those fostering interdisciplinary and intercollegiate collaboration within Drexel.
This year’s Carleone Faculty Award recipients and their projects are:
- “Integrated Optical and Multi-Modal Biosensing for Non-Invasive Assessment of Metabolic and Autonomic State”
Principal Investigator: Adam Fontecchio, PhD (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Co-Investigators: Jennifer Atchison, PhD (Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics); Evangelia Chrysikou, PhD (College of Arts and Sciences)
- “Development of aqueous quantum dot gene delivery vehicle for in vivo CAR-T cell therapy”
Principal Investigator: Wei-Heng Shih, PhD (Materials Science and Engineering) Co-Investigators: Xiao Huang, PhD (School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems); Wan Shih, PhD (School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems)
Grimes Family Faculty Awards
The Grimes Family Faculty Award promotes interdisciplinary and intercollegiate collaboration with a strong emphasis on driving innovation and positioning Drexel as a leader in its key research areas.
This year’s Grimes Family Faculty Award recipients and their projects are:
- “Assessing Risks of Hydrogen Fluoride in Catalysis: Learning from the 2019 Release from a Philadelphia Refinery”
Principal Investigator: Shannon Capps, PhD (Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering)
Co-Investigator: Ezra Wood, PhD (College of Arts and Sciences)
- “Bayesian Inference for Dynamic Transport Control in Electrochemical Separations”
Principal Investigator: Wesley Chang, PhD (Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics)
Co-Investigator: Cecilia Mondaini, PhD (College of Arts and Sciences)
- “Neurosymbolic Learning for Safe Autonomous Driving under Ambiguous Trust”
Principal Investigator: Zhiwei Chen, PhD (Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering)
Co-Investigator: Chen Zhang, PhD (College of Computing & Informatics)
The College of Engineering congratulates all the awardees and looks forward to the impactful research and innovations that will emerge from these interdisciplinary collaborations.