UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Andrew Zydney, professor of chemical engineering, and Vijay Narayanan, professor of computer science and engineering and electrical engineering, have been conferred the status of distinguished professors in Penn State's College of Engineering, the highest professorial distinction in the college.
They were selected following a recommendation from the Harold and Inge Marcus Dean of Engineering, Amr Elnashai, for their exceptional teaching, research and service records.
Anthony Atchley, senior associate dean of engineering, said, "Andrew and Vijay exemplify the best qualities in our faculty. We are proud of their accomplishments and pleased to bestow the title of distinguished professor in the college."
Zydney has been a Penn State faculty member since 2002 and served as the chemical engineering department head from 2004 to 2014.
His research activities are focused in three distinct areas: artificial organs, bioseparations and membrane processes.
Zydney is a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and a member of the American Chemical Society, the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs, the American Society for Engineering Education and the North American Membrane Society.
He is currently editor-in-chief of the Journal of Membrane Science, the leading publication in the membrane area.
Narayanan joined Penn State in 1998.
His research interests include power-aware and reliable systems, embedded vision systems, nanoscale devices and interactions with system architectures, reconfigurable systems, computer architectures, network-on-chips and domain-specific computing.
Narayanan is currently the lead principal investigator for "Visual Cortex on Silicon," a $10 million Expeditions in Computing award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.
His awards and honors include: fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and recipient of a 2001 NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award and a 2000 ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award.