Three Engineering Professors on "World’s Most Influential" List | Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering

Left to right: Governor’s Chair Ramamoorthy Ramesh; Matthew Mench, head of the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering; and Professor David Mandrus

Since having your work recognized by your peers has long been considered a top honor for those in higher education, a trio of College of Engineering professors recently became academic all-stars.

Governor’s Chair Ramamoorthy Ramesh and professors Matthew Mench and David Mandrus were recently named to the “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds: 2014″ list by Thomson Reuters news service.

“This is a tremendous personal honor for all three of them, and also a strong validation of some of the things that we have going on here in the College of Engineering at Tennessee,” said Wayne Davis, dean of the college.To compile the list, Reuters studied research and releases across the globe and measured the total number of times that other researchers, professors, and students cited the material in their own findings.

Rather than just basing their result on which people had been cited the most overall, Reuters looked at which individual papers within the results had been cited the highest number of times.

Those findings placed Ramesh, Mench, and Mandrus in the top 1 percent of all research scientists across the world.

“For them to be on the list itself is nice enough, but for it to be based on the respect that others in their fields have for them—for their peers to so often cite them as leaders—underscores the sort of people we have on our faculty here,” said Davis.

Along with being a Governor’s Chair, Ramesh is the deputy director for science and technology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in addition to his role in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UT—where Mandrus is also a professor—while Mench is the head of and the Condra Chair of Excellence in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering.

Ramesh is an expert in solar nanotechnology, while Mench studies electrochemical power storage, transport, and conversion, and Mandrus is a leader in developing breakthroughs that lead to ever-smaller, more efficient electronics.

—C O N T A C T :David Goddard (865-974-0683, david.goddard@utk.edu)http://tntoday.utk.edu/2014/08/13/three-engineering-professors-worlds-most-influential/