ATI Intern Wins $10,000 Granof Outstanding Graduate Student Award
ATI Intern and Chemical Engineering Doctoral Candidate William B. Liechty Wins $10,000 Granof Outstanding Graduate Student Award
AUSTIN, Texas—William B. Liechty, a Cockrell School of Engineering doctoral candidate at The University of Texas at Austin, has won the $10,000 Michael H. Granof Outstanding Graduate Student Award at the Graduate School/University Co-op Awards for Excellence in Graduate Education.
The Excellence in Graduate Education Awards recognize and reward outstanding graduate students for distinguished scholarship, research, writing, service and teaching.
Liechty, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, is completing his dissertation, which involves the development of dual-responsive nanoscale hydrogels for the oral delivery of small interfering RNA. According to his dissertation advisor, Professor Nicholas Peppas, his dissertation project is one of major importance to the biomaterials world. He has been recognized with numerous awards, including travel grants to conferences, a presentation award from the Society for Biomaterials, and notably the 2011 Excellence in Graduate Research Award from the Graduate School.
Liechty represented The University of Texas at Austin at the 61st meeting of Nobel Laureates at Lindau (one of 70 delegates from the U.S.), and he has also been instrumental in the development and growth of Texas Venture Labs, where he led several cross-functional deal teams, and helped partner companies raise nearly $8 million. He has served as department representative to the Graduate Student Assembly, as President of the Graduate Chemical Engineering Society, and also as a member of the President's Student Advisory Committee.In summer 2011, Liechty co-founded a summer program that provides high-school students, most of whom would be first-generation college students, an internship focused on drug delivery and biomaterials research. All of the participants expressed serious intent to pursue degrees in STEM fields after completing the internship. Outreach initiatives like these are critical to improving the diversity of future researchers in science and engineering.
Prior to UT, William earned a B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Iowa, and as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, received a M.Phil in Chemical Engineering from The University of Cambridge.
Liechty plans to graduate in May 2013.
Also, read about the winners of the 2012 Graduate School Professional Awards.
About ATI:
The Austin Technology Incubator is a not-for-profit unit of the IC2Institute of The University of Texas at Austin that harnesses business, government and academic resources to provide strategic counsel, operational guidance and infrastructure support to its member companies to help them transition from early stage ventures to successful technology businesses. Since its founding in 1989, ATI has worked with hundreds of companies, helping raise close to $1 Billion in investor capital. For more information, visit www.ati.utexas.edu.
