Grayson

Griffin

Engineering students Malika Grayson, Ph.D. ’16, and Darvin J. Griffin, Ph.D. ’15, have received the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) Mike Shinn Distinguished Member of the Year award – one of the organization’s highest honors for graduate students.

The award goes annually to a female and male NSBE member who exemplify the NSBE mission and demonstrate high scholastic performance, dedicated service to the society and other organizations, and hold professional promise. Cornell officials noted that it's unusual for the award to go to two students from the same institution. 

Grayson, a member of the Laboratory of Intelligent Machine Systems in mechanical and aerospace engineering, studies the optimization of buildings and structures to better harness wind energy. Her dissertation is titled “Urban Wind: Impact of building geometry on potential wind energy yield.”

Grayson is co-director of the Graduate Society of Women Engineers, has been a member of NSBE for four years, and has served as community service and pre-collegiate chair for the past three years. Under her leadership, the group has performed hundreds of hours of community service.

She was instrumental in expanding NSBE’s involvement with Ithaca’s Southside Community Center, and she created and hosted an engineering day at Beverly J. Martin Elementary School. She has also forged partnerships with the Science and Math Saturday Academy, and helped reactivate the Ithaca High School NSBE Jr. organization.  In addition to the Mike Shinn award, Grayson was also awarded NSBE’s Board of Corporate Affiliates Scholarship and was also named Collegiate Member of the Month.

Griffin works with Professor Larry Bonassar’s research group in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He investigates the structure-function relationship of healthy, damaged and repaired articular cartilage. Results from his research have been published in many peer-reviewed journals and presented at scientific conferences. He has received fellowships and accolades including the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, SUNY Graduate Diversity Fellowship, Sage and Coleman Academic Scholarship, the NSBE Board of Corporate Affiliate Scholarship, the NSBE Major Sponsor Scholarship, the NSBE Fellows Scholarship, the NSBE Graduate Student Professional Conference Scholarship and the NSBE Fulfilling the Legacy Scholarship.

Griffin serves as a mentor to minority students in STEM (science, technology, engineering math) fields at the middle school and college levels. He has led programming for more than 180 pre-college black and Latino high school students in the summer program, CATALYST Academy, as residence hall director.

According to the NSBE, Mike Shinn award winners are role models for the entire NSBE membership. The award was given during the NSBE annual convention on March 28 in Anaheim, California.