Members of the engineering community honored two ASU engineers at the annual Greater Phoenix Area Engineering Awards gala held on February 23.
Jim Collofello
Jim Collofello, associate dean of academic and student affairs, was named Outstanding Educator and Madeline Grade, biomedical engineering student, was named Outstanding Engineering Student.
Each year, the awards ceremony recognizes engineers, students, educators and projects that have made outstanding contributions to the engineering profession. The event is part of National Engineers Week.
As the engineering schools’ associate dean of academic and student affairs since 2006, he led a transformation of the student experience through several innovative new programs and strategic expansion of existing programs that enable students to achieve success in and beyond the classroom.
Collofello and his team developed E2 Camp, a three-day orientation camp for new freshmen. He has retooled introductory engineering courses and formed a team of lecturers engaged in curricula development. Another pivotal part of the reinvention of the first year experience under Collofello’s guidance is the Freshman Career Exploration Night.
Many Fulton Engineering students participate in hands-on, real-world research through programs including the signature Fulton Undergraduate Research Initiative. Others pursue entrepreneurial endeavors through the highly successful Engineering Projects in Community Service.
Collofello has also initiated programs that help students gain valuable leadership skills including undergraduate teaching assistant, mentoring and study team leader programs.
Last year, Collofello was honored with the Daniel Jankowski Legacy Award in recognition of the value of his efforts to advance the mission of Fulton Engineering.
Collofello joined ASU in 1979. He serves as professor in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering.
Madeline Grade
Madeline Grade, senior in biomedical engineering, has not only an impressive list of achievements; she has been an advocate for engineering both on and off campus.
In 2011, Grade was selected to give a presentation at an American Academy of Neurology meeting—an opportunity rarely offered to an undergraduate—on the epilepsy research she has participated in at ASU’s Brain Dynamics Laboratory and Mayo Clinic, where she has been a premedical scholar since 2009.
Also in 2011, Grade founded and continues to lead ASU’s first team to enter the International Genetically Engineered Machine student competition, the premier undergraduate synthetic biology competition.
She is an ASU Presidential Merit Scholarship winner. She has twice won Excellence in Engineering Leadership awards and the Hans Hartjens Commitment to Service Award from Fulton Engineering.
She was accepted into Alpha Eta Mu Beta, the biomedical engineering honor society. She has served as outreach coordinator and president of ASU’s student chapter of the Biomedical Engineering Society, and co-founded the Ambassador program which supports current students and recruits students to the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering.
In the community, Grade has done work with PROJECT C.U.R.E. (Commission on Urgent Relief & Equipment), the ASU student chapter of Engineers Without Borders, and has tutored middle school and high school students in the Phoenix metropolitan area in science, engineering and math.
Grade was recently awarded one of the most prominent post-graduate scholarships given to college and university students in the United States, the Marshall Scholarship. The scholarship funds two to three years of graduate study. After graduating from ASU in May, she plans to study at University College London’s world-renowned UCL Institute of Neurology.
