Faiz Khan wins 2022 ECS Student Impact Award

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Each year, the College of Engineering Career Services office solicits nominees for its annual Student Impact Awards from employers who have hired Ohio State engineering students. Doctoral student Faiz Nisar Khan (Jessica Winter's Group) was one of two students this year to win the honor.

Faiz Khan, 2022 Impact Award
Faiz Khan and his manager at Corteva

Khan worked at Corteva Agriscience during the summer of 2021. As a doctoral student who expects to complete his Ph.D. by the summer of 2023, he had sought an internship to help him understand industry work dynamics in preparation for ultimately transitioning to an industry role. This is a goal he has worked towards throughout his time at Ohio State. “Faiz’s commitment to industrial chemical engineering is commendable. He has developed and interrogated new processes in nanomanufacturing, an emerging industry segment, that will undoubtedly impact commercial scale production," said his advisor, Jessica Winter.

At Corteva, Khan's main responsibility was to develop a new characterization tool to extend the team's capability to understand formulation/product properties. His supervisor described him as taking initiative and being passionate and creative in his approach to assignments, noting that in about three months or less, Faiz was able to prove the concept of the tool by building a gadget from scratch, optimizing its performance, validating the data generated by the gadget, and collecting a huge amount of data for new formulations/products. His summer work thus provided a lot of new information for ongoing product development and his new setup will be a standard characterization method. The data generated from it will continue to be critical for formulation/product development. 

"Faiz has impressed all his Corteva colleagues (and me) with his exceptional initiatives, ownership, creativity, communication skills, execution skills and problem-solving skills," his manager wrote. "From the first day he was here, Faiz has been very much devoted in the project. He searched literatures without being asked, and independently started the collaboration work. He keeps a big picture in his mind, while solving each detailed problem one-by-one. He is a hardworking hands-on person, and at the same time he shares his creative ideas with colleagues around him. He delivered quite a few presentations to different groups of audience during his internship and each time was very well received. His great passion and leadership makes him the type of person that everyone wants to work with," she said.

This is not the first time Khan's capabilities have been recognized. In March 2022, Khan won Second Place in the 2022 Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum in the Oral-Engineering section. He described the method for ensuring controlled nanoparticle synthesis using jet microreactors. This was a follow up to his April 2021  First Place win in the Engineering Poster Presentation at the Hayes Graduate Research Forum, speaking on the same subject.

In addition, in October 2021, Khan won first place in Session One of the American Chemical Society (ACS) Indiana Local Section's PREDICT 2021 Graduate Student Lightning Talk Contest. Again, his topic was "Application of jet mixing reactors for controlled, rapid nanoparticle synthesis." Also in October 2021, he was one of three winners of Ohio State's Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering 2021 Graduate Research Symposium's Poster Session Competition.