Faculty Honored for their Excellence in Scholarship and Research – Villanova University
Villanova celebrated its distinguished faculty members and their achievements in scholarship and research at the annual Faculty Scholars Awards on October 13. Through their research and scholarship, the three faculty honorees bring Villanova’s Augustinian Catholic mission to life, combining the best of what is known with the courage to explore the undiscovered.
The 2025 recipients of the Outstanding Faculty Research (Andrej Prša, PhD), University Scholarly Achievement (Sylvie Lorente, PhD) and Mid-Career Scholar (Meltem Izzetoglu, PhD) awards were recognized for their contributions to their fields, the Villanova community, and their impact on the student experience.
"These awards honor scholarship that begins with the imagination and dedication of our faculty," said Amanda M. Grannas, PhD, Vice Provost for Research and Chief Research Officer. "Scholarship that transforms the students who work alongside them and finds its way into their writing and their classrooms, inspiring students to see the world in new ways. Their scholarship carries Villanova’s name far and wide, showing that this is a place where teaching, research and creativity are inseparably linked."
In addition to the three honorees, Bo Li, PhD, Aimee Eggler, PhD, Qianhong Wu, PhD and Lorente were recognized for their recent patents.
Andrej Prša, PhD
Professor, Astrophysics and Planetary Science
HPC Clusty and Terra Administrator
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Andrej Prša, PhD, received his Bachelor of Science in Astronomy and Astrophysics and a PhD in Astrophysics and Particle Physics from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. With a passion for stellar astrophysics and computational modeling, Dr. Prša has dedicated his career to unraveling the complexities of binary star systems and stellar evolution.
In the astronomical community, Dr. Prša is best known as the lead developer of PHOEBE (PHysics Of Eclipsing BinariEs), an open-source software suite used globally for modeling eclipsing binary stars. His leadership in this project has helped bridge observational data and theoretical models, enabling precise measurements of stellar parameters from light curves and radial velocity data. He is also involved with science advocacy, having served as President of the International Astronomical Union’s Division for Stars and Stellar Systems.
Beyond his technical expertise, Dr. Prša is deeply committed to mentoring students and fostering collaboration across disciplines and institutions. He has served on numerous scientific committees, including NASA missions and community software initiatives. He is also a strong advocate for open science and reproducible research.
Dr. Prša frequently gives invited talks and contributes to outreach efforts aimed at promoting public understanding of astrophysics. His work reflects a balance of academic rigor, technical innovation and educational commitment.
Dr. Prša’s research centers on computational stellar astrophysics, with a particular focus on eclipsing binaries, stellar evolution and data-model integration. Through the development of PHOEBE, he has advanced the ability of the astronomical community to infer accurate physical properties of stars from observational datasets. His group combines Bayesian inference techniques, dynamical modeling and machine learning to address open questions in binary star evolution and population synthesis. He is actively involved in space missions and surveys such as Kepler, TESS, LSST and Gaia, contributing to catalogs of well-characterized stars that serve as benchmarks for stellar theory. His research has implications for understanding stellar structure, calibration of stellar models and broader galactic evolution. Dr. Prša’s contributions sit at the intersection of astrophysics, computation and data science.
Sylvie Lorente, PhD
Senior Associate Dean for Research and Innovation
William M. Brown ’84, ’87 Endowed Chair in Mechanical Engineering
College of Engineering
Sylvie Lorente, PhD, received her Bachelor of Science, Master of Science and PhD from the University of Toulouse. Since June 2024, she has served as the inaugural William M. Brown ’84, ’87 Endowed Chair Professor in Mechanical Engineering.
In 2019, she joined Villanova University as College of Engineering Chair Professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering after a career at the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA), University of Toulouse, France. She obtained her PhD in Civil Engineering – Energy and Buildings in 1996 at INSA.
Dr. Lorente is also an Adjunct Professor at Duke University. She was appointed Hung Hing-Ying Distinguished Visiting Professorship in Science and Technology at Hong Kong University from 2017 to 2021 and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria (South Africa) from 2011 to 2021.
She is a member of the Academia of Europaea and a member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Energy Conversion and Management and a member of several editorial boards, including Nature–Scientific Reports.
Dr. Lorente has a passion for flow architectures and works on thermal design, energy storage, vascularized structures, porous media, biological flow networks, urban design and organizations. She pioneered the field of flow architectures of heat, mass and fluid that morph towards better efficiency, following her work on constructal design, a physics-based approach predicting the natural occurrence and evolution of flow architectures. Together with her group, she uncovers the engineered and biological hierarchical flow pathways that endow complex systems with efficient properties and behaviors. She is the author of seven books, 10 book chapters and 230+ peer-reviewed international journal papers. She is listed among the top 2% most cited scientists worldwide since 2017.
Meltem Izzetoglu, PhD
Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Director, Biomedical Signals, Systems and Analysis (Bio-SSA)
Director of the Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering Program
College of Engineering
Meltem Izzetoglu, PhD, earned her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science from Middle East Technical University. Dr. Izzetoglu earned her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Drexel University. She holds a research affiliation with the Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Before joining Villanova, she was a research faculty member at Drexel’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems and an adjunct faculty member at Rowan University. Her interdisciplinary expertise spans electrical and biomedical engineering, with a focus on the development of portable and wearable bio-optical technologies.
Dr. Izzetoglu’s work involves advanced signal conditioning, biomarker extraction and data analytics for applications ranging from clinical medicine to fundamental research. She played a critical role in translating two medical devices from laboratory prototypes to commercial products and holds four issued patents with two pending. As a recognized leader in her field, Dr. Izzetoglu is a member of the IEEE and the fNIRS Society and serves as an editor for Frontiers in Physical Neuroergonomics. She has authored over 190 peer-reviewed publications and led multiple externally funded research initiatives supported by the National Institutes of Health, US Department of Defense, Coulter Foundation and Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development. In addition to her research, Dr. Izzetoglu is a dedicated educator, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in bioinstrumentation and biomedical signal processing while mentoring students in innovative research projects.
Dr. Izzetoglu’s research focuses on the development and refinement of cutting-edge non-invasive and wearable optical neuroimaging technologies and their data analytics to enable reliable and real-time detection and monitoring of brain health and cognitive performance under naturalistic and clinical settings. Her multi-modal use of complementary brain/body sensing biomarkers in powerful machine learning algorithms has profoundly improved our understanding of neural and physiological mechanisms underlying different cognitive and emotional states in healthy and diseased populations, guiding the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of brain disorders and injuries throughout the lifespan. Some of her current projects include assessment of mobility and cognitive abilities in healthy aging and age-related diseases and impairments, investigation of human performance in everyday settings and after interventions, detection and monitoring of brain injury, optical synthetic and digital twin models of human head, detection of neurological, neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases and mental disorders including MS, Parkinson’s disease, ADHD and learning disabilities.
Bo Li, PhD
Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Hybrid Nano-Architecture and Advanced Manufacturing Lab (HNAM)
College of Engineering
Co-Inventor
Liang Zhao ’25 PhD
Nanomaterials with exceptional properties have attracted significant attention over the past decades. However, due to their nanoscale dimensions, these materials often require deposition onto specific substrates for practical applications. The properties of the substrate can play a critical role in the overall functionality of the resulting system. Unfortunately, nanomaterials and substrates frequently exhibit vastly different chemical or physical characteristics, posing major challenges for deposition.
This patent protects a generic solute-assisted assembly method for depositing a wide range of micro- and nanomaterials onto diverse substrates directly from water-based solutions or suspensions. The process involves introducing water-soluble solutes—such as salts—into the nanomaterial solution or suspension, which induces deposition onto target substrates composed of polymers, metals or ceramics.
This method offers several key advantages:
Preservation of material integrity: Neither the nanomaterials nor the substrates require harsh chemical or physical pretreatment, thus preserving their intrinsic properties.
Simplicity and sustainability: The process eliminates the need for additional chemicals such as volatile organic solvents, surfactants or binders.
Broad applicability: It enables effective deposition across material systems with mismatched surface properties—for example, attaching hydrophilic nanomaterials to hydrophobic polymer surfaces.
This versatile technique holds promise for advancing applications in biomedicine, energy, electronics, functional coatings for textiles and household technologies.
Aimee Eggler, PhD
Associate Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Co-Inventors
Sandra Tamarin ’22 MS
Laura Biesterveld ’22 CLAS
Joseph LaMorte ’23 CLAS
In the US, one in five people will die from cancer. Most current cancer treatments, including radiation and chemotherapies, are toxic to both normal and cancer cells; more selective treatments could reduce side effects. Aimee Eggler, PhD, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, along with several of her research students, was awarded a patent for the development of a “cocktail” of two molecules that together specifically cause toxicity to cancer cells as compared to normal, healthy cells. The first molecule in the cocktail, a manganese porphyrin, is in clinical trials as a radioprotectant, protecting the normal cells of cancer patients from the harmful effects of radiation treatment through its powerful antioxidant effects. Dr. Eggler’s group discovered that combining a manganese porphyrin with another antioxidant, the widely used food oil preservative tert-butyl hydroquinone, results in a potent cocktail that kills cancer cells, including ones derived from leukemia and prostate cancers. In contrast, the cocktail has little to no effect on normal prostate cells. Because this anti-cancer cocktail is made of two well-known and well-characterized molecules administered to humans with low toxicity, and because it is much more toxic to cancer cells than to healthy cells, it shows significant promise in becoming a useful agent in the fight against cancer.
Qianhong Wu, PhD
Professor and Chair, Department of Mechanical Engineering
Director of the Cellular Biomechanics and Sports Science Laboratory
College of Engineering
Co-Inventor
Ji Lang ’18 PhD
Qianhong Wu, PhD, created a novel non-invasive test apparatus for the study of impact-induced brain trauma, including a see-through head model with a biomimetic skull and a brain. Within the interior of the skull chamber, a gel material and fluid are disposed to resemble an anatomical representation of the human skull and brain configuration. Further, the invention allows a patient-specific skull and brain model to be constructed to match an individual’s anatomical specifications.
The biomimetic test model is accompanied by a plurality of sensors and high-speed cameras, which are used to detect impact-induced brain injuries. This enables an in-depth study of the brain, unlike any other testing device in its class. Such a model and approach allow the examination of the flow and pressurization of the cerebrospinal fluid flow (CSF) in the subarachnoid spaces (SAS) as the head is exposed to sudden external impacts. Further, deformations or stretching of the brain can also be observed because of the see-through model design. An impact element is configured to simulate different types of impact surfaces and orientations. This includes both translational and rotational impacts, which may be tested individually or simultaneously. For example, an impact element may include or simulate concrete, the ground, metal, a bat, a ball, a vehicle, a person’s head or other impact elements. An actuator can precisely control the impact element to provide consistent impacts on the simulated head model, the consistent impacts having consistent physical parameters, including but not limited to impact velocity and acceleration.
The apparatus and testing methods can be used to provide predictable results in locating the potential areas of the brain that sustain injury. Such capability better informs care providers in understanding the type of possible injuries their patients suffer and how best to treat them; at the same time, reducing the number and amount of whole brain scans.
Sylvie Lorente, PhD
Senior Associate Dean for Research and Innovation
William M. Brown ’84, ’87 Endowed Chair in Mechanical Engineering
College of Engineering
Co-Inventor
Adrian Bejan, PhD
Duke University
J. A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Sylvie Lorente, PhD, was awarded a patent for the design of an isothermal compression system that compresses and expands air without significant temperature changes.
Dr. Lorente’s innovation, created in partnership with Adrian Bejan, PhD, J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University, aims to improve the efficiency of compressed air energy storage (CAES) by maintaining a constant temperature of gas during its compression and expansion. In conventional systems, temperature fluctuations require additional energy input, reducing overall efficiency.
Unlike existing technologies that rely on external devices to regulate temperature, Drs. Lorente and Bejan’s design integrates a phase change material within the compression chamber itself. Similar to wax, phase change materials exist as a solid at low temperatures and melt into a liquid as temperatures rise. When air inside the chamber is compressed and heats up, the phase change material absorbs that heat; when the air expands and cools, the material releases stored heat, ensuring a stable temperature throughout the process.
The phase change material used in Drs. Lorente and Bejan’s system has a dendritic structure, meaning it resembles the shape of tree branches. This design enhances air flow and minimizes resistance, making the system more efficient. The size of the phase change materials used in the compressor can also be adjusted depending on the intended application of the system.
Design for the CAES system took two years, involving theoretical analysis and numerical modeling for the chamber and materials. With the patent now secured, the next step is to build a prototype to bring this innovative technology closer to practical application.
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