Marco Panesi named Caterpillar Faculty Scholar

Marco Panesi, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been named Caterpillar Faculty Scholar. This award is conferred upon faculty members who are in a relatively early stage of their career and are excelling in their contributions to the university.

“The award is intended as a type of ‘junior professorship’ that will represent the first stage of what we hope will be a series of progressive stages of recognition for Panesi’s work here at Illinois,” said Jonathan Freund, head of the AE department. "His hypersonics work is already attracting international recognition in an important application area."

Panesi joined the faculty in the department in 2012. He conducts research in the areas of hypersonics aerothermodynamics, plasma dynamics and uncertainty quantification. He has won a number of awards, including the Young Investigator Program award from AFOSR and the Early Career Faculty award from NASA. He has won Best Paper/Presentation Awards at AIAA conferences a number of times. In 2015, he received the Award on Physical Modelling at the Symposium on Aerothermodynamics for Space Vehicles (ESA) for his contribution to the fundamentals of aerothermodynamics.

This past year, Panesi also began serving as the director of the new Center for Hypersonics and Entry Systems Studies.