In recognition of the exemplary accomplishments in research, scholarship, and creative activity by faculty members and graduate students at Illinois Institute of Technology, the Office of the Provost, the Office of Research, and the Illinois Tech Chapter of Sigma Xi sponsor the annual Sigma Xi/IIT Awards for Excellence in University Research. Sigma Xi is a scientific research society of nearly 75,000 scientists and engineers who have been elected to the society because of their research achievements or potential.

This year they presented one award in the student category, one award in the junior faculty category, and one award in the senior faculty category.

The awardees are:

Hongxing Ye (Electrical Engineering, student category) Carly Kocurek (Humanities, junior faculty category) Tomasz Bielecki (Applied Mathematics, senior faculty category)

Brief biographies of each of the awardees appear below:

Hongxing Ye – Student

Hongxing Ye received the B.S. degree and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate of Electrical Engineering at the ECE department under the supervision of Zuyi Li. His research interests include electricity markets, large-scale optimization, and cyber-physical security in smart grid. At Illinois Tech, Hongxing has developed advanced models for renewable energy integration. He has proposed original research on utilizing a market based mechanism to manage the uncertainties caused by high penetration of renewables. This work is regarded as innovative, well-motivated, and promising by top researchers in his field. A proposal based on this work was funded by National Science Foundation in 2015. Hongxing has more than 10 publications in top-tier journals.

Carly Kocurek – Junior Faculty

Carly A. Kocurek is assistant professor of digital humanities and media studies in the Department of Humanities. She researches the culture and history of video games and designs and develops games for serious and educational purposes. She is the author of the book Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade, published by University of Minnesota Press, and Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls, which is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press. She is the co-editor of the Influential Game Designers book series for Bloomsbury Press. Her articles have appeared in journals including Game Studies, The Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and Visual Studies. She is currently working with Assistant Professor of Psychology Jennifer Miller on a Nayar Prize finalist project, “Game Development for Early Language Acquisition in High-Risk Children.”

Tomasz R. Bielecki – Senior Faculty

 Tomasz R. Bielecki is professor of applied mathematics at Illinois Institute of Technology. He is an author of numerous research papers in the areas of stochastic analysis, stochastic control, manufacturing systems, operations research and mathematical finance. He is a co-author, with Marek Rutkowski, of the monograph Credit Risk: Modeling, Valuation and Hedging, which was published by Springer-Verlag in 2002 and reprinted in 2004.  He also co-authored, jointly with Monique Jeanblanc and Marek Rutkowski, the monograph Credit Risk Modeling published by the Osaka University Press in 2010. His most recent book, Counterparty Risk and Funding, coauthored with Stephane Crepey and Damiano Brigo, was published in 2014 by Chapman & Hall. He has been a recipient of five research grants from the National Science Foundation, as well as research grants sponsored by the Moody’s Investors Service. The areas of his current research interests include valuation and hedging of counterparty risk, modeling of structured dependence between stochastic processes, mathematical theory of dynamic performance assessment indices, as well as applications of stochastic control to optimal portfolio selection.

He has previously held academic positions in the Warsaw School of Economics, University of Kansas, and University of Illinois at Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, and a visiting position in the New York University. He also held several visiting positions at numerous universities and research institutions Worldwide. Bielecki currently serves as an associate editor of Mathematical Finance, SIAM J. Control and Optimization, International Journal of Applied and Theoretical Finance, European Journal of Pure and Applied Math and Stochastics, and International Journal of Portfolio Analysis & Management. He consulted for Argonne National Laboratory, Bank One, Quantitative Risk Management, Bloomberg, AVM LLC, Banc of America and Merrill Lynch.

To watch the Sigma Xi Lecture held on April 11, 2016 by Geza Gyuk, click here.