Engineering Excellence: 2026 BME Faculty Awards & Honors 

BME faculty continue to shape the future of biomedical engineering through groundbreaking research and innovation. This past year, their impact was recognized through prestigious awards and honors, as well as transformative research funding that will help continue to advance discovery and innovation across the field. 

Awards & Honors

• Tom Yankeelov received the 2026 President’s Research Impact Award from The University of Texas at Austin. 
• Tyrone Porter was elected to the 2026 class of Biomedical Engineering Society Fellows.
• Nicholas Peppas was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). 
• Evan Wang was named a 2026 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. 
• Michael Sacks was the recipient of the 2026 H.R. Lissner Medal for Contributions to Heart Valve Simulations. 

Research on the Rise

• Researchers Elizabeth Cosgriff-Hernández, Jeanne Stachowiak, Samantha Santacruz, Andrew Dunn and Stephanie Seidlits received grants from The National Institutes of Health, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world. The funding, which supports research across the health ecosystem, totals more than $11 million.

• Stephanie Siedlits and a team of UT researchers received an NIH S10 Instrumentation grant for the first light sheet microscope in the central Texas region. This tool will help advance biomedical research across a variety of applications. 
• Edward Castillo was awarded seed funding from Good Systems, UT Austin’s interdisciplinary research group investigating ethical AI use, for his research project, “Knowledge-Informed Multimodal Responsible AI for COPD.” 

• Samantha Santacruz, in collaboration with UT Austin assistant professor Jin Yang in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, has received funding from the Army Research Office to conduct research advancing understanding of traumatic brain injury among both warfighters and civilians.