Dr. Sharath Girimaji, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University, has been awarded the 2014 Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award in Teaching, College Level. Each fall The Association of Former Students honors outstanding faculty members for their dedication to teaching. These awards recognize, encourage, and reward superior classroom teachers – those individuals whose command of their respective discipline, teaching methodologies, pervasive caring, communication skills, and commitment to the learning process exemplify the meaning of teacher/mentor in its highest sense. This award is designed to distinguish those teachers who maintain high expectations of their students and who ensure academic rigor in their courses. Distinguished teachers recognize their responsibility in motivating and contributing to the overall development of the student.
Girimaji teaches general dynamics of aerospace engineering. He was nominated for his outstanding performance in the classroom, his commitment towards providing exciting extracurricular activities within the Dwight Look College of Engineering, his outreach to high schools through Project Aether and Camp SOAR and his commitment to teaching and mentoring of high level graduate students. Girimaji maintains one of the top-producing research programs in the department, where he couples these activities into his teaching mission.
In addition to his impact in the classroom, he has developed several extracurricular activities, including the High-Altitude Balloon Club (HABC), Space Propulsion, and Air-Swimmers. HABC was founding as an undergraduate research club under Girimaji’s mentorship with the objective to demonstrate low-cost, accessible space exploration through high altitude balloon launches. The club has launched over 40 balloon flights, most of them reaching up to 100,000 feet. Through Space Propulsion, the main goal is to introduce talented undergraduates to aerospace engineering related scientific research, including modeling plasmas and turbulence effects in aerospace engineering and other fields. The Air-Swimmers project participants develop theory and perform computations, experiments and demonstrations of caudal fin efficiency by examining aquatic animals such as Koi, tuna and sharks.
Girimaji is also one of the main mentors of the educational organization Project Aether, which collaborates with high schools to teach students physical concepts and experimental research skills. Girimaji is also involved in Camp SOAR, a weeklong summer camp for high school juniors and seniors involving hands-on experience in various aerospace engineering design projects.
His commitment to graduate education starts in the classroom, where he has developed and taught three different graduate courses: Fundamentals of Turbulence – Turbulence Processes, Topics in Turbulence Modeling and Rarefied Gas Dynamics. He has mentored over 35 undergraduate summer research students, and has graduated 12 Ph.D. and 17 master's students at Texas A&M.
Girimaji received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from IIT Madras, India and his master's degree and Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Cornell University. He has been a member of the aerospace faculty for 14 years.