SOE Announces 2020 Award Winners

May 30, 2020

SOE Announces 2020 Award Winners

The School of Engineering recently announced this year's winners for its Annual Awards Ceremony and five members from the ECE department received recognition.

"I was looking forward to our annual celebration on a beautiful, sunny spring day as we marked the end of another successful academic year," mused SOE Dean Christos Christodoulou. "However, due to circumstances beyond our control, that was not to be for 2020."

But even COVID-19 couldn't stop the Dean's Office from vetting its many award nominees and arriving at an impressive list of winners, many of whom came from the ECE department.

Duncan Madden received the prestigious George E. Breece Prize. As you may recall, Madden won the Outstanding Senior Award in 2019. The George E. Breece Prize was established in 1921 and is probably the oldest endowment in Engineering. The Prize is awarded to the School of Engineering graduating senior with the highest GPA.  

Here are the other awards that were claimed by our ECE Students:

  • Nicholas Christian Ross won the Outstanding Sophomore Award.
  • Skyler Valdez won the Outstanding Junior Award.
  • Kendric Ray Ortiz won the Outstanding Senior Award.
  • And Georgios Fragkos won the Outstanding Graduate Student Award.

Cover SOE BookletGeorgios Fragkos performs research in the PROTON Lab with his advisor Prof. Eirini Eleni Tsiropoulou. The PROTON Lab (which stands for Performance and Resource Optimization in Networks Lab) focuses on multidisciplinary research relating to national security and societal needs, such as modeling, design, optimization and performance of large-scale interconnected systems like public safety networks, as well as artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning, game theory, and human behavior modeling.

Fragkos has authored several papers on topics such as multi-access edge computing, distributed decision making, artificial intelligence, and blockchain. In spring 2020 was selected as the outstanding graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research is supported by Professor Tsiropoulou’s funded project, “NSF CRII: NeTS: Real-life modeling for EFficient RESource management in Heterogeneous multi-user systems – REFRESH” (#1849739).

While at UNM, he has been involved in IEEE and IEEE HKN and is a member of the Electrical Engineering Students’ European Association. In August, he will begin an internship at Sandia National Laboratories in the renewable and distributed systems integration department focusing on PV cybersecurity standards research and development.

Please click this sentence to download the 2020 SOE Awards booklet!

ECE congratulates the winners of the 2020 awards as well as all of our students for their outstanding accomplishments during this challenging year.