Alejandro Azocar, an undergraduate student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University, received the 2015 Ammon Andes National Award from Sigma Gamma Tau (SGT), the national aerospace engineering honor society. In addition, Azocar was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
A memorial to the late University of Kansas administrator and longtime SGT executive secretary-treasurer, the Andes award is presented annually to one outstanding student for exceptional academic achievement and participation in extracurricular activities.
This prestigious award honors Azocar as the top outstanding aerospace engineering student in the United States, based upon his academic, service and extracurricular accomplishments. The honorarium is in the form of a check for $750 and a plaque documenting his award. In addition, a brass nameplate will be installed on the department's Sigma Gamma Tau Award perpetual plaque.
The Sigma Gamma Tau undergraduate awards serve to select outstanding aerospace engineering students at both the regional and national levels, to recognize the accomplishments of these young students as they start their professional careers. Texas A&M is a member of the Southwest Region, which also includes the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, the University of Texas at Arlington, and the University of Texas at Austin. The Texas A&M University chapter leads the country with the most national winners, six in total. The national winners are designated as the top aerospace engineering senior in the United States for that year. The most recent Texas A&M national winners were Joseph E. Bishop (1989), John Michael Fife (1992) Justin Wilkerson (2009) and Kristin Nichols (2013).
The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based Master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions. He conducted research as a freshmen with Dr. John Hurtado in the Land, Air, and Space Robotics Lab. As a junior he worked with Dr. John Valasek in the Vehicle Systems and Control Lab, and this year he conducted research with Dr. Aaron Ames in mechanical engineering. He also spent five terms as a co-op at NASA Johnson Space Center.
Azocar graduates in May and will continue his studies pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Northwestern University. He will be working at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago with a research focus on either bionics or brain-machine interfaces. He hopes to develop prosthetic arms, legs, and exoskeletons that can be robustly controlled using neural signals.