Kuznetsov receives Humboldt Research Award

Dr. Andrey V. Kuznetsov, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at North Carolina State University, has received the Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.

The award recognizes the achievements of outstanding academics worldwide whose discoveries, insights, or theories have made significant impacts on their scientific disciplines, and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge research. By honoring the internationally recognized scientists and scholars from abroad, the Humboldt Foundation aims to bring top experts to Germany in order to promote international cooperation between German scholars and research institutions and their foreign counterparts. The award comes with a monetary prize of 60,000 Euros, or about $78,000 at today’s exchange rates.

As a winner, Kuznetsov will continue his research on transport in various thermofluid and biological systems at the Institute of Thermo-Fluid Dynamics in the Hamburg University of Technology, collaborating with Dr. Heinz Herwig. He also plans to visit several research centers in Germany during his appointment, which will last up to one year.

Kuznetsov is involved in multi-disciplinary research in which molecular biology meets mathematics and physics of microscale dimensions. His work includes modeling transport of micron-sized vesicles that are propelled by molecular motors inside neural cells. The results of this research could advance our understanding of what goes wrong in the intracellular transport machinery in such devastating neurodegenerative diseases as the Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. He has also developed models of transport of prions, infectious agents that cause the Mad Cow disease.

Kuznetsov is also co-editing two new reference books on mass transfer and fluid mechanics processes in biological media. The books further scholarly understanding of transport processes in biosystems.

Kuznetsov is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is the author of more than 350 archival journal papers in the leading research journals in his field and has collaborated with researchers in Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Australia and the Ukraine. He is also an adjunct associate professor in the Joint UNC-NC State Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Kuznetsov received an MS in mechanical engineering from Bauman Moscow State Technical University in 1988, an MS in applied mathematics from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1990, and a PhD in mechanical engineering from the Mechanical Engineering Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow in 1992. He joined the NC State faculty in 1998 after post-doctoral appointments at Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany), Ohio State University, and Vienna University of Technology (Austria).