Levendis Receives ASEE Robert G. Quinn Award
MIE Distinguished Professor Yiannis Levendis is the recipient of the 2025 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Robert G. Quinn Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the promotion of excellence in experimentation and laboratory instruction.
The award, which recognizes outstanding contributions in providing and promoting excellence in experimentation and laboratory instruction, consists of a $5,000 honorarium, a medal, and an inscribed plaque and will be presented at an awards ceremony during the ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Tanner Stening. Main photo: Yiannis Levendis, distinguished professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, will receive the 2025 ASEE Robert G. Quinn Award. Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University
A proponent of experiential learning, Yiannis Levendis wins 2025 ASEE Robert G. Quinn Award
Yiannis Levendis has spent a career thinking about ways to repurpose waste and generate alternative, clean energy sources.
In his world, that has meant lighting a variety of things on fire.
“I burn coal; I burn liquid fuels; I burn biomass, and lately, I’ve been burning iron, if you can believe it,” Levendis says. “If you pulverize iron into a powder, you can ignite it and it will burn like coal, like carbon.”
Levendis, a distinguished professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University, is a leading authority in emissions from diesel engines, as well as coal-fired and alternative fuel-fired power plants.
Having spent 37 years at Northeastern, Levendis has had his hand in a great many subjects. He’s developed methods for reducing toxic emissions and techniques for fire suppression (one such technique is the use of liquid nitrogen as a fire extinguisher). He’s probed the combustion of different materials and conducted extensive research on the oxygen-enhanced combustion of diesel fuel, coal, and biomass.
Beyond his interest in clean fuel, he’s designed an environmentally friendly ceramic oil filter for cars that can be removed, cleaned, and reinstalled.
“I am working in all of these areas, and I’ve tried to bring my research experiments into the classroom and motivate the students to learn more,” Levendis says.
As part of that effort, Levendis has developed teaching laboratories where students can acquire hands-on experience and actively solve problems through real-time experimentation. For the course he teaches on the internal combustion engine, for example, he generated laboratories complete with focused experiments for each aspect of the mechanical engine—from the water pump to the spark igniter and transmission.