College of Engineering Recognizes CAR Faculty

On April 27, 2022 the annual College of Engineering Distinguished Faculty Awards recognized the faculty and staff who go above and beyond in their work. The College of Engineering gives a variety of awards out each year, including the Lumley Research Award and the Ohio State-Honda Partnership Award. This year, three of those recipients are from the Center for Automotive Research (CAR). These award winners are Matilde D’Arpino, Lisa Fiorentini and Stephanie Stockar.

Matilde D’Arpino

CAR Research Scientist, Matilde D’Arpino, one of this year’s winners of the Lumley Research Award, has made significant contributions to CAR in her seven years of work there. She has worked on projects relating to power conversion and energy storage systems for automotive, aviation, space and grid connected systems - all thanks to the interdisciplinary nature of CAR.  

One of her most important projects in the last five years was looking at the use of hybrid powertrain configurations and energy storage in aviation. For this project, D’Arpino worked with NASA and a number of students at Ohio State to try to make aviation more efficient and create less waste. She enjoys working with outside companies and federal agencies like the Department of Energy and the Air Force, noting that the work done at CAR “bridges the gap” between these groups.  

“Great research is done in a team,” said D’Arpino. “The award has my name on it, but it feels like the award is more so for the great group of people I have been working with these last five years.”

Lisa Fiorentini

Winner of the Ohio State-Honda Partnership Award, Lisa Fiorentini, assistant professor-clinical in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and CAR-affiliated faculty member has played a crucial role in establishing a relationship between The Ohio State University masters program and Honda.

In her seventeen years at Ohio State, Fiorentini has done work in many different areas of electrical engineering, from research in aerospace control systems with the Air Force Research Lab and NASA, to powertrain control and autonomous driving research with CAR. At CAR, she said, she has found a wonderful environment that allows her to jump into many different projects and do research in areas she is passionate about.

Over the last few years, she has been working on a project with Honda and 20-25 students who had to design and implement a visual inspection system and a real-time interface to support the quality inspection in the passenger vehicles’ manufacturing process.

“Honda has been great to work with,” said Fiorentini. “The associates worked with the students and allowed them to go in their manufacturing plant and see the impact of the work they were doing in addition to being flexible in regard to the pandemic, which hit in the middle of their project.”

This project, as well as Fiorentini’s significant contributions to research and education all made her the perfect candidate for the Ohio State-Honda Partnership Award.

Stephanie Stockar

Stephanie Stockar, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) and CAR-affiliated faculty, was one of the winners of this year’s Lumley Research Award. Stockar was nominated for her research contribution in the broad area of optimization and control of multi-scale, multi-physics systems. Her research supports the energy efficiency and sustainability of the transportation sector and the built environment. Her work is sponsored by both industry and government agencies, such as ARPA-E and NSF. "The combination of funding sources in my research portfolio helps attract and support students with different but equally challenging career goals,” she added.

Stockar said she was surprised and honored to be nominated for the award. She also noted that, while this award is given to the faculty, it is the result of an outstanding team effort with students, researchers, and other faculty.

Since joining Ohio State in fall of 2019, she has been growing her research group and, currently, she advises seven students - six graduates and one undergraduate. In addition to mentoring them in their academic careers, Stockar is striving to build a collaborative research environment that is well integrated with MAE and CAR and hopes that "this will ensure the students are having the best experience they can both at Ohio State and outside the classroom!"

Written by CAR Writing Intern, Cassie Forsha