Faculty, students, and an alum from the Air Force Institute of Technology received 2022 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Awards. 
 

AFIT alum Lt. Col. Paul Dolce (M.S. Electrical Engineering, 2011) received the AF Outstanding Scientist/Engineer, Senior Military Category award.
 

AF Outstanding Scientist/Engineer, Junior Civilian - Dr. Scott Nykl, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Graduate School of Engineering and Management.

The Air Force Outstanding Scientist/Engineer Awards recognize the efforts and achievements of the top U.S. Air Force scientists or engineers who make noteworthy and/or significant contributions to technology, engineering and/or solving technical problems in development, sustainment, testing, training, or advancement of Air Force systems.

Dr. Nykl developed a novel vision recognition algorithm which automates cross-DoD aerial refueling. His efforts led to deployed technology on the KC-46 and MQ-25 for the Air Force and Navy leading to a savings of over $10M annually and significant air dominance improvements in contested environments.
 

AF Outstanding Science and Engineering Educator Award – Maj. Daniel Emmons, Assistant Professor of Applied Physics, Graduate School of Engineering and Management.

The Air Force Outstanding Science and Engineering Educator Award recognizes the efforts and achievements of the top Air Force instructor in science and engineering fields whose contributions and performance best characterize the principles of excellence in science and engineering education.

Maj. Emmons’ demonstrated excellence in teaching and researching space physics. In addition to his appointment as a Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Professor, he advised two doctoral and three master’s students resulting in a total of four peer-reviewed journal articles during the award period. Additionally, he secured $950K in space weather research funding while directing the Department of Defense’s only graduate level space weather program.

 

AFIT Systems Engineering Award - Mode-Based Autonomous Systems Engineering Team, Graduate School of Engineering and Management. Team members: Capt. Charles Caines, Capt. Igor Gertsman, Capt. Jacob Hatzinger, and Capt. Christopher Reed. 

The AFIT Systems Engineering Award recognizes AFIT students or teams for outstanding achievements in furthering systems engineering understanding in the Department of the Air Force.

The M-BASED team supported the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Munitions Directorate by contributing novel research in autonomous systems development, modeling, and simulation. They designed, implemented, and tested a methodology to model behaviorally complex autonomous munitions using systems modeling language and coded middleware to translate the system requirements to the advance framework for simulation, integration and modeling environment. They applied rigorous analysis from over 200,000 trial runs to determine the optimal level of cooperation versus payload lethality for autonomous munitions during wide-area search.