Inaugural ARC Excellence in Research Award

We are excited to announce the inaugural winner of the Automotive Research Center Excellence in Research Award. The aim of this award is to identify a diverse pool of outstanding candidates that have demonstrated excellent academic achievement and provide opportunities for them to become involved in the ARC through a paid research internship over a single academic year.

Our inaugural recipient, Varsha Swamy, is a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering within the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, a long-time partner school in the ARC. A recipient of the prestigious New Horizon Graduate Scholarship at Virginia Tech, Varsh has already demonstrated her passion and dedication to research through two first-authored conference papers based on research she conducted during her undergraduate studies. Obtaining leadership capabilities as the Project manager and Vehicles dynamics Head for the HAYA - Formula student team, Varsha is well positioned to conduct her proposed research. Varsha’s proposed research focuses on studying tire-mud interactions and developing new models based on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and Finite Element Analysis techniques. We look forward to seeing the successes from Varsha’s research.