University of New Orleans Mechanical Engineering professor Uttam K. Chakravarty and two UNO Ph.D. alumni have received the ORR “JEMT Best Paper” Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Drs. M. Shafiqur Rahman and Uttam K. Chakravarty accepted the award during a ceremony hosted by the ASME Materials Division at the 2025 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition in Memphis, Tennessee, on November 19. The honor recognizes the top paper published each year in the ASME Journal of Engineering Materials and Technology in the areas of experimental, computational, or theoretical fatigue, fracture, or creep.

The winning article, “An Investigation of Tensile, Fatigue, and Fracture Behavior of 3D-Printed Polymers,” was written by Rahman, Chowdhury Sadid Alam, Mohammad Khairul Habib Pulok, Congyuan Zeng, and Chakravarty. The study, published in 2025, examines the mechanical performance of polymer materials produced through additive manufacturing.

Chakravarty is a professor of mechanical engineering and the Huntington Ingalls Inc. Professor of Engineering at UNO. He supervised Rahman and Pulok during their doctoral studies in the Engineering and Applied Science program. Rahman completed his Ph.D. in 2020 and is now a tenure-track assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Louisiana Tech University. Pulok completed his Ph.D. in 2022 and works as a packaging research and development engineer at Intel Corporation in Chandler, Arizona. The research recognized by ASME began while Rahman and Pulok were graduate students at UNO.

Established in 2004, the ORR “JEMT Best Paper” Award is presented annually at IMECE. Eligible papers published in JEMT are nominated by the journal’s editor and associate editors and reviewed by the ASME Materials Division Executive Committee.