Three instructors in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MECH) have been honored for their accomplishments as teachers by Rice University.
The Presidential Mentoring Award has gone to Marcia O’Malley, the Thomas Michael Panos Family Professor in MECH. The Sophia Meyer Farb Prize for Teaching was presented to Geoff Wehmeyer, assistant professor of MECH. The Student-Taught Course Teaching Award went to Savannah Cofer ’20, mechanical engineering (MECH), a first-year doctoral student at Stanford University.
O’Malley is director of the Mechatronics and Haptic Interfaces Lab at Rice. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in MECH from Vanderbilt University in 1999 and 2001, respectively, and joined the Rice faculty in 2001. She holds complementary appointments in electrical and computer engineering and computer science at Rice.
In 2020, O’Malley was named a Fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). She is also a fellow of the ASME.
She has served on the editorial boards of the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics and the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and now serves as senior editor for the ASME/IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics and the ACM Transactions on Human Robot Interaction, and associate editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics.
Wehmeyer, director of the Nanoscale Heat Transfer Lab, earned his Ph.D. in MECH from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2018 and joined the Rice faculty the same year. In 2019 he received NASA’s Early Career Faculty Award. The Sophia Meyer Farb Prize was awarded to two Rice non-tenured faculty by the Beta of Texas chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Wehmeyer teaches courses in heat transfer and thermal physics.
While at Rice, Cofer worked in O’Malley’s Mechatronics and Haptic Interfaces Lab. She received the Goldwater Scholarship, Google Scholarship and American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’s Space Technology Scholarship.