5/27/2025 2 min read
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MechSE Professor Naira Hovakimyan has won the 2025 Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring from The Grainger College of Engineering.
The award is presented annually to faculty who have demonstrated sustained excellence and innovation in graduate student mentoring.
Hovakimyan is a highly sought-after advisor, both in research and teaching. Her research program is one of the largest in the department, currently supporting 19 doctoral and master’s degree candidates, four undergraduate students, and five postdoctoral fellows. In her 16 years at Illinois, she has already graduated 32 PhDs, with many of them winning awards and honors for their work. She believes the process of teaching and mentoring is a two-way street between her and her students/mentees, where she can inspire and guide the next generations of academics by listening and understanding and through sharing her knowledge and lessons learned.
Hovakimyan has won many international, national, and university accolades during her career for both mentoring and research. Last year, she was the recipient of the Grainger Engineering Award for Excellence in Translational Research.
She joined the University of Illinois faculty in 2008 and holds the W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins Professorship. She is affiliate faculty in the departments of aerospace engineering, electrical and computer engineering, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, the Coordinated Science Lab, Information Trust Institute, and the Beckman Institute. She is director of the AVIATE Center and the Advanced Controls Research Laboratory.