Each year, Florida State University’s Council on Research and Creativity bestows upon select faculty the distinction of a Developing Scholar Award—which comes complete with a $10,000 boost to the awardee’s program of research. The FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering are proud to claim Kunihiko “Sam” Taira as one such recipient of the 2017-2018 awards.
Dr. Taira, an engineering researcher at the Florida Center for Advanced Aero-Propulsion (FCAAP), was recognized among other awardees at a reception earlier this month for his exceptional work in computational fluid dynamics. Taira became an associate professor for the college in 2011.
Having received international recognition from more than 32 papers in high-impact journals, Taira has also co-authored a textbook titled “Computational Fluid Dynamics: Incompressible Turbulent Flows,” which was published in 2016. In addition to his journal papers, he has published 39 conference papers and given more than 42 invited talks.
In a letter of recommendation from department chair Dr. Emmanuel Collins, Taira was commended for his exceptionally strong research record.
“First, he has received two Department of Defense (DoD) early career awards: the ONR Young Investigator Award (2016) and the AFOSR Young Investigator Award (2013),” Collins explained. “Receiving one of these grants is competitive enough already, and being awarded with two is outstanding. Thus far, he has received 23 external grants (additional two approved and processing) and 1 internal FSU grant.”
Of these, his portion of $6.6 million raised amounted to roughly $3.7 million. Taira currently has 10 active grants.
His teaching record has also garnered praise.
“What is very pleasing to me as chair is that Sam takes his teaching as seriously as he does his research,” continued Collins, who noted that in the time since joining FSU, Taira has developed three new courses, and has received the ASME 2015-2016 Mechanical Engineering Teacher of the Year Award from the organization’s Tallahassee chapter as well as the 2016-2017 University Undergraduate Teaching Award from FSU. In terms of research supervision, Taira has supervised five postdoctoral research associates, six Ph.D. students and one MS student, as well as 12 undergraduate research assistants.
College of Engineering Dean J. Murray Gibson was also among those to recommend Taira for the award, going as far as to say that despite having several deserving and qualified faculty at the college, “there is no one I could recommend more strongly than Dr. Sam Taira. His contributions to the college exceed those of any other associate professor at this stage in his career.”
“The College has an initiative to provide faculty performing computational research with a local cluster,” Gibson said. “This project was motivated in large part by the great success of Sam's research program.”
When asked for a response, all Dr. Taira had to say was, “I am honored to receive this award from FSU. Our research and teaching efforts were made possible by our hard working research group members with the support from our great colleagues in the department and research center — I am very thankful to them.”