Professor Arumugam Manthiram and Senior Lecturer Thomas M. Kiehne have been selected as the 2011 Mechanical Engineering Teaching Award winners. These awards were considered from nominations made by undergraduate and graduate students and are selected by a committee of students and faculty. The winners of the 2011 awards selected from a long list of outstanding nominees, are as follows:
- Arumugam Manthiram, Professor, for Outstanding Teaching in Mechanical Engineering
- Thomas M. Kiehne, Senior Lecturer, for Outstanding Teaching in Mechanical Engineering by an Assistant Professor or Lecturer
Please join our ME community in congratulating these award winners and supporting the dedication to excellence in teaching that they exemplify.
Bio Dr. Thomas Kiehne
Dr. Thomas Keihne
Dr. Kiehne has experienced a broad-spectrum career encompassing the highest levels of military, government, and academic service in addition to substantial research experience. Dr. Kiehne received his B.S. in General Engineering from West Point, his M.S. in ME from Michigan State and his Ph.D. in ME from The University of Texas at Austin. He had a distinguished 22-year military career, culminating in the rank of Colonel at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research, Acquisition and Development where he had program management duties at DARPA.
His teaching career began during his military service, when he was an Assistant and Associate Professor at West Point for seven years. After retiring from military service, he joined The University of Texas at Austin as a research engineer and senior lecturer. He was simultaneously a member of the senior technical staff at the Institute of Advanced Technology (IAT) serving as Director of the Hypervelocity Physics Division. Currently he is both a Senior Lecturer in the Mechanical Engineering department and a Research Engineer at Applied Research Laboratories (ARL), where he conducts research in thermal management for the U.S. Navy.
Dr. Kiehne teaches in the Department's Thermal-Fluid Systems Group where he has taught thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, the associated labs, thermal-fluid systems, turbomachinery, and compressible flow. He has also taught engineering statics, and will soon teach propulsion, in the Aerospace Department.
Bio Professor Arumugam Manthiram
Professor Arumugam Manthiram received B.S. (1974) and M.S. (1976) degrees in chemistry from Madurai University, India, and a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 1980 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai. After his doctoral work, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, for one year, as a Lecturer at Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, for four years, and as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, England, for one year and at the University of Texas at Austin for five years. He became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 1991 and rose to the rank of Professor in 2000. He is currently the Joe C. Walter Chair in Engineering and Director of the Texas Materials Institute.
In the research arena, he directs a large research group in electrochemical energy technologies with 27 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. His current research is focused on materials for lithium-ion batteries, supercapacitors, fuel cells, and solar cells. Specifically, his group is engaged in developing new, low-cost, efficient materials for these clean energy technologies. He is the co-founder of ActaCell, a company engaged in commercializing novel materials developed in his laboratory for high-power lithium-ion batteries. He holds seven patents and has authored more than 400 publications. In late 2010, he and Professor John Goodenough were awarded a $4.5 million grant along with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to develop lower cost lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and electric grid system to enable better utilization of alternative energy sources like wind, solar, and nuclear. Read more about this grant.
Professor Manthiram has taught an undergraduate course entitled "Materials Engineering" and two graduate courses entitled "Electrochemical Energy Materials" and "Materials Characterization Techniques."
