Liliana Ruiz Diaz Selected as 2018 Outstanding Graduate Student of the Year Award by College

COLLEGE OF OPTICAL SCIENCES OUTSTANDING GRADUATE STUDENTS

Each spring, the College of Optical Sciences recognizes incredible students, as nominated by professors and selected by a faculty committee.Two Outstanding Graduate Student awards were given, one went to Liliana Ruiz Diaz (nominated by Bob Norwood). Professor Norwood had to say of Liliana:

"I became her advisor in the Fall of 2014 and since then she has been working on our ARPA-E FOCUS and ARPA-E MOSAIC programs. These are very demanding, milestone driven efforts to build a prototype hybrid CSP/CPV solar energy system (FOCUS) and a high efficiency solar panel system (MOSAIC). Liliana joined the effort midway through her first semester and immediately added great energy to our team. She showed herself to be a tireless worker willing to make the extra effort to get key results ahead of critical review meetings and reports; she was largely responsible for enabling the program to achieve one of its major first year milestones (a 95% transmitting concentration module). She quickly adapted to changing project responsibilities and embraced the mastery of required software such as LightTools and SolidWorks. Indeed, modeling and simulation work that she performed led our team to winning another ARPA-E program (MOSAIC) during her second year."

Congratulations Liliana!

Read more at http://www.optics.arizona.edu/news-events/news/quicknews/2018-outstanding-students