Alper Erturk received two distinguished awards in the award ceremony of the ASME Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures and Intelligent Systems Conference in Colorado Springs, CO, on September 23.

- ASME 2015 Best Paper Award in Energy Harvesting: The award was given by the ASME Aerospace Division - Energy Harvesting Technical Committee "to recognize an outstanding contribution to published research advancements in the field of energy harvesting" following an additional peer review of nominated journal papers that appeared in the previous calendar year. Dr. Erturk's paper on "Nanoscale Flexoelectric Energy Harvesting" (International Journal of Solids and Structures, 2014, Vol. 51, pp. 3218-3225) jointly authored with his collaborators from the University of Houston was recognized with this inaugural award. Vibration energy harvesting using flexoelectricity (strain gradient-induced polarization) is a next generation alternative to piezoelectric energy harvesting (which is based on strain-induced polarization), enabling the possibility of power generation using non-piezoelectric materials since flexoelectricity is exhibited by all elastic dielectrics, while its effect is significant only at very small scales. Dr. Erturk's collaborative paper presents a complete electro-elasto-dynamics framework of this problem to account for scale-dependent energy harvesting using gradient effects in centrosymmetric cantilevers.

- ASME Gary Anderson Early Achievement Award: The award was given by the ASME Aerospace Division - Adaptive Structures and Material Systems Branch "to recognize notable contributions to the field of adaptive structures and material systems" within 7 years of terminal degree. Dr. Erturk published more than 130 theoretical and experimental articles in archival journals and conference proceedings in areas pertaining to smart structures, including piezoelectric energy harvesting (from vibrations, fluid flow, elastic/acoustic waves, etc.), bio-inspired actuation and locomotion, novel piezoelectric structures with inherent material and designed geometric nonlinearities, and contactless power transfer using piezoelectric transduction.