2025 Dean's Awards for Excellence

Congratulations to the faculty of Virginia Tech Engineering being honored with a 2025 Dean’s Award for Excellence.

Virginia Tech is celebrated in the commonwealth and throughout the nation for the excellence of our programs in engineering education, research, and public service. The Dean's Awards for Excellence recognize our faculty members' incredible work, which has directly or indirectly impacted the success of our students.

Among this year’s award winners were aerospace and ocean engineering faculty members Nathan Alexander, Gary Seidel, Craig Woolsey and Gregory Young. Winners across the College of Engineering were recognized by Dean Julia Ross in early May.

Excellence in Teaching: Gary D. Seidel

In his role as Assistant Department Head for Academic Affairs, Seidel is the first to notice when qualified instructors are unavailable for critical courses in the department. In recent semesters, he has often been the one to step into that gap and he has done so with characteristic excellence.

For the past three Spring semesters, he has taught AOE 4048: Engineering Design Optimization. Despite not having the course before, he added his own innovations, such as an engaging classroom exercise comparing ad hoc optimization with a more principled approach. He has also stepped in to teach the large required course AOE 2024: Thin-Walled Structures and AOE 2104: Introduction to Aerospace Engineering and Aircraft Performance in recent semesters and received high marks of praise from the students.

Seidel is very committed to incorporating comprehensive and accessible teaching practices that include recording and posting all of his lectures, providing supplemental material and coding/tool demonstrations, and holding extensive in-person office hours. He works hard to foster an environment of mutual respect for all in his classroom and research group.

Excellence In Research: Greg Young

Young joined the department five years ago after spending some 18 years at the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Indian Head, MD. In his short time at Virginia Tech, he has brought in over $15M in new research money, published 21 journal papers and 20 conference papers that have stoked a rapidly rising citation rate, with almost 300 citations in 2024. Young has built new laboratories and facilities in the Prices Fork Research Center and at the Advanced Power and Propulsion Laboratory to support his groundbreaking research in solid rocket fuel science, technology and manufacturing. 

He has built new partnerships, with faculty inside and outside of Virginia Tech. In 2023 he was both architect and leader of a successful Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) proposal on polymeric solid fuel combustion. Through this $7.5 million research effort he has brought together top researchers and engineers from Penn State, Georgia Tech, Iowa State University, Stanford University, University of California Riverside, and North Carolina State University to conduct experiments and develop computational models that detail how a variety of solid fuels will burn in various flow conditions – putting Virginia Tech at the center of national and international research in solid rocket propulsion.

His goal from the start was to grow a world class research group and facilities which would be competitive with any university in the country. He realized early on that in order to meet his goal, a new facility where energetics experiments could be conducted safely, and materials could be stored safely and securely needed to be constructed. This facility, located at Prices Fork Research Center, was completed in 2023 allowing for the first time VT experimental research on solid and hybrid rockets.

He has successfully attracted research grants from the Office of Naval Research to explore techniques for improving the flameholding and flammability characteristics of Solid Fuel Ramjets; from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) to study solid and gel propellants which can be controlled using applied electric power; and the Army Research Lab and Advanced Technology International to utilize state of the art additive manufacturing to develop novel concepts leading to improved capability for hybrid rockets, solid fuel ramjets and solid fuel scramjets. This work has helped establish Virginia Tech as a major competitor in the United States in the area of energetic materials.

Excellence In Service: Craig Woolsey

Woolsey’s selfless commitment to service has been a constant throughout his 24 years at Virginia Tech. Outside of his teaching responsibilities, he finds time to serve prospective K-12 students, the department, the College of Engineering and the dynamics and controls community at large. 

Each summer, Woolsey and his students host all eight cohorts of CTech2 and BEE VT at the Kentland Experimental Aerial Systems (KEAS) Laboratory. In recent years he served as the College of Engineering representative to the University Promotion and Tenure (P&T) Committee, Chair of the AOE P&T Committee, and Chair of the search committee for a new department head for the department of aerospace and ocean engineering. 

Woolsey was instrumental in establishing the local Ridge & Valley Chapter of the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) in 2016 and has served continuously as an officer on its Executive Committee since then.

One of his most notable service accomplishments during the past two years was his organization of IFAC CAMS 2024. This marked the first time in its 35-year history that this international conference was hosted in the United States. The meeting attracts more than 100 of the world’s most active and impactful maritime control systems researchers. That Virginia Tech hosted the first meeting in the U.S. – to universal acclaim by the conference participants – is of great value to the university. 

Faculty Fellow: W. Nathan Alexander

Since joining the department, Alexander’s level of research performance has been outstanding in terms of high quality, broad impact, exceptional scholarship and superb graduate student mentorship. At the same time, he has performed at the highest level in teaching and service missions as well. 

Since 2022, he has been awarded $7M in total external funding, supporting research in application areas spanning the aeronautical and marine domains. His research has broad impact across the commercial, defense, and environmental sectors. His work on propeller noise in gusty environments is being assembled by NASA as a benchmark case for validation of computational studies, and will have significant impact on the development of new concepts for commercial aviation within urban environments. 

Two of his current projects, sponsored by DOE and USACE, are focused on conservation efforts designed to keep protected bat species away from wind turbines and deter invasive fish species from traveling up the Mississippi River. Finally, in research sponsored by ONR, he is developing methods for sensing and tracking underwater acoustic sources with compact hydrophone arrays on small autonomous vehicles. 

Alexander has also collaborated with many researchers inside and outside the university in academic institutions including Boston University, the University of Notre Dame, Iowa State University, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Tuskegee University, University of Exeter, University of Cambridge, and the University of Salford. 

Alexander has also received consistent recognition of his exceptional teaching performance from students, and has been dedicated to supporting the university’s service and outreach initiatives. This past summer, Alexander planned and hosted a week-long event for 19 undergraduate students from underrepresented communities in engineering to show them opportunities in graduate school and teach them about eVTOL vehicles and autonomous systems. 

Alexander is active in service to professional societies, particularly AIAA. He serves on the Transformation Flight Integration and Outreach Committee and Aeroacoustics Technical Committee; as the Technical Discipline Chair for Aeroacoustics at the AIAA Aviation 2025 Forum; and as a regular reviewer and session chair at the AIAA Aviation and SciTech Forums.