Associate professor Diwakar Shukla has received the 2023-2024 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research. This award is given annually by The Grainger College of Engineering in recognition of outstanding research by associate professors during the past five years.
Shukla has been on the Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering faculty since 2015, where his research is focused on computational and experimental methods to understand biophysical processes for applications in plant biology and human diseases. He has received many honors for his work, including the Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship (2022), Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship (2019), National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2018), OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty in Computational Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (2018), and the Young Investigator Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineering’s Computational Molecular Science and Engineering Forum (2018). Shukla received a prior Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research (2018), in the assistant professor category.
“I am honored to receive this recognition on behalf of the outstanding student researchers in my group, collaborators and mentors at Illinois,” Shukla said. “They inspire me every day by their excellence and enthusiasm for research.”
Shukla is an affiliate faculty member in the Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology, the Computational Science & Engineering Program, the Department of Plant Biology, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He received his Ph.D. (2011) and M.S. (2009) degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and M.Tech. (2006) and B.Tech. (2006) from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, all in chemical engineering. Shukla was a Postdoctoral Fellow (2011-2014) in Chemistry at Stanford University.
Grainger College will honor Shukla and other awardees at their Annual Engineering Awards Convocation on April 29, 2024.