Four members of the Notre Dame engineering community have been named 2025 award recipients by the Graduate School, in recognition of their outstanding contributions to graduate education and research. The honorees include two faculty members and two doctoral students whose achievements reflect excellence in mentorship, program development, scientific discovery, and social impact.
Alexander Dowling — James A. Burns, C.S.C., Award
Alexander Dowling, associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is the winner of the James A. Burns, C.S.C., Award in recognition of his outstanding work at the midpoint of his career as a mentor of graduate students. Dowling has shown exceptional aptitude and dedication to mentoring young scholars in his field, with 11 of his advisees—graduate students and postdoctoral scholars—having already launched successful careers at leading companies and research institutions, including Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Amazon Research. He currently supervises 12 graduate students and two postdocs; together they create and apply new computational tools to optimize complex systems.
Glen L. Niebur — Dick and Peggy Notebaert Award
Glen L. Niebur, professor and chair of the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, is the winner of the Dick and Peggy Notebaert Award, which honors a faculty member or administrator who has had a significant impact on graduate studies at Notre Dame. Niebur has made an enduring contribution to graduate studies at Notre Dame through his work on designing and helping launch the Bioengineering Graduate Program, which he directed from 2012 to 2023. During his successful tenure as director, the program more than doubled in size, and now claims many prominent and award-winning alumni in both university and industry settings.
Marlee Elizabeth Shaffer — Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Award in Engineering
Marlee Elizabeth Shaffer, Ph.D. candidate from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, is the recipient of the Eli J. and Helen Shaheen Award in Engineering. An engineer focused on the detection and inactivation of viral pathogens in water systems, Shaffer has published extensively during her graduate career—nine total publications, with five of these being first-author or co-first-author publications. She was the first to apply a novel method to assess the persistence and disinfection of norovirus in water systems, and her outstanding research offers a comprehensive framework to improve environmental monitoring, public health interventions, and viral risk assessment and management strategies.
Oghenemaro Anuyah — Social Justice Award
Oghenemaro Anuyah, Ph.D. candidate from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, is the winner of the Social Justice Award, given annually to a graduate student in the Notre Dame community who has tackled complex societal issues through scholarship, teaching, and service. As a computer scientist, Anuyah has used her research to embody the University’s challenge to be a force for good and to serve the most vulnerable in our communities. Through ethnographic methods and community-based participatory research, she focuses on how recent advances in large language models and generative artificial intelligence (AI) can be employed to facilitate knowledge management and knowledge transfer within social service agencies. A core component of her research involved collaborating directly with four different South Bend social service organizations—St. Margaret’s House, Our Lady of the Road, Center for the Homeless, and the Food Bank of Northern Indiana—where she conducted in-depth fieldwork to understand the service providers’ needs and collaboratively design AI-driven tools that help them better share resources and provide assistance to the communities they serve. Anuyah’s research has been published in leading computer science conferences and journals and has been supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.
The award winners will be formally recognized for their achievements at the Graduate School Commencement Ceremony to be held at Notre Dame Stadium on May 17.
Originally posted at graduateschool.nd.edu by Eric Heath on April 11, 2025.