Four faculty members receive 2026 Ruth and Joel Spira Awards

The recipients of the 2026 Ruth and Joel Spira Awards for Excellence in Teaching are Cullen Buie, Gabriele Farina, Ericmoore Jossou, and Farnaz Niroui.

Cullen Buie is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Biological Engineering. His laboratory explores flow physics at the microscale for applications in microbiology, immunology, and biotechnology. His team has developed tools to explore a wide array of problems including communication within microbial communities, cell phenotyping, and high throughput gene editing.

Gabriele Farina is the X-Window Consortium Career Development Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). His research interests include solid theoretical and algorithmic foundations for learning and computational decision-making under imperfect information. In his work, he combines and advances techniques and notions of strategy from game theory together with modern tools from machine learning, optimization, and statistics.

Ericmoore Jossou is the John Clark Hardwick (1986) Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research focuses on materials design for nuclear energy applications. He currently leads the Materials in Extreme Environments Research Group, which combines experiments with computational methods to improve the performance of existing nuclear fuels while designing new fuels for advanced reactors.

Farnaz Niroui is the Robert J. Shillman (1974) Career Development Professor in EECS. Her research pushes the limits of nanoscale engineering toward the atomic scale by developing new nanomanufacturing techniques to engineer unique material properties and physical phenomena. She investigates and harnesses these emerging phenomena to establish new paradigms for computing, sensing, and transduction, enabling multifunctional and intelligent devices and systems.