An Auburn University professor has received the highest honor from the Alabama Academy of Science.
Pradeep Lall, the John and Anne MacFarlane Professor in the department of mechanical engineering, is the 2016 recipient of the Wright Gardner Award. Lall said it was a great honor to be recognized by the academy.
"It was a little bit unexpected, but it was wonderful to be recognized," Lall said. "The fact that my contributions and my accomplishments had been recognized by the academy to a level where they would deem it at the level that it would be recognized with the Gardner award was special."
The academy contacted him ahead of its annual meeting in February to let him know he would be recognized.
Lall was recognized for his research involving electronic systems operating in harsh environments. He said most of his work and his research has been based on creating pre-competitive technologies to make a societal impact.
As the director for Center for Advanced Vehicle and Extreme Environment Electronics, a National Science Foundation Center, Lall said he works with members of the industry to come together and solve problems of greater societal interest.
"The idea is to work on pre-competitive things before it becomes a product and companies are worried [about sharing ideas,]" Lall said. "It's in a pre-competitive stage where it's not a product, [but] it's more of a technology and the companies are saying, 'Okay, we're going to come together and solve a bigger problem, and then we can take the information that's a part of the solution and create products based on it.'"
Lall is also the director of the Harsh Environment Node of Nextflex, where he leads the effort for flexible hybrid electronics. The idea, according to Lall, is to make everything flexible so it won't break and can be moved easily. For example, cell phones are rigid and can break when dropped.
Lall said this new type of technology would be able to make "this kind of rollable, flexible, foldable [or] bendable" material where it won't break if dropped.
"You can imagine a world where you can say, 'I'm going to take my monitor, I'm going to roll it up as a poster, put it in a tube, [and] get on a plane,'" Lall said. "[Then] I go to my hotel room and I can hang it up on my wall and have a 60-inch TV instead of that small 19-inch that I [would] have to watch in the hotel room."
Because Alabama and the South have a strong manufacturing foothold, with companies such as Kia and Hyundai based in the region, flexible technology could become a major partner in these industries, according to Lall.
One of the things the institute hopes to do is bring some of the manufacturing jobs that have gone off shore back to the U.S., according to Lall.
"You could have flexible heads-up displays so while you're driving, you could have your text messages displayed on the screen," Lall said. "I don't have to look at my phone [while I drive]."
Lall also teaches classes in the Business-Engineering-Technology Program and said he wants students to have a bigger perspective beyond engineering so they can picture how things come together with business and technology. Lall has an MBA in finance and said the BET program is "wonderful" because it allows students to tie in aspects of business and engineering.
"Once you get out into the real world, you have to worry about the technical aspects, but you have to worry about how everything comes together to kind of make an economic impact," Lall said. "I feel that program helps the business and the engineering community melt together, come together."
Lall said he thinks there are excellent students at Auburn, and they are the ones who make it possible for him to do all these things.
"Nothing really happens, none of the research ever happens [without them], so I'm always very excited about the quality of students that we get here and how hard-working they are," Lall said. "They are actually the folks who work in the labs and work with the professors to make all these things happen so ... that's really the big driving force. That's the big secret."
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