Yan Wan is the recipient of 2007 College of Engineering and Architecture Graduate Student Excellence Award.

While her strong interest in multidisciplinary research, mentorship of new students and excellent writing ability were factors that caught the eye of her mentors, it was the level of Yan Wan’s accomplishments for which she was selected for the $5,000 award.

“She’s really extraordinary in terms of her work effort and the results of those efforts,” Professor Sandip Roy, her advisor, said. “She has published in important journals and presented at significant conferences. Her work compares favorably to that of students in top-tier programs.”

Wan's research is concerned with developing a new decentralized control theory for networks, and pursuing its application in such diverse fields as air traffic management, virus-spreading control, and sensor networking. Her current publications include “Validation of mixed-genome  microarrays as a method for genetic discrimination,” in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Wan is from Nantong, China. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and her master’s degree from the University of Alabama. She is expected to graduate from WSU in 2008.

College of Engineering and Architecture Graduate Student Excellence Award is made possible by the Alfred Suksdorf Memorial Fund.