Omar Ghattas Receives Faculty Advising Award

Faculty advising is often defined by output: degrees earned, papers published, careers launched. But its true impact is felt in quieter moments, when a student begins to understand where they belong and how they can contribute. That quality of mentorship is what earned mechanical engineering professor Omar Ghattas the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences Faculty Advising Award, honoring his sustained commitment to developing the next generation of computational scientists and engineers.

Ghattas is also the director of the Optimization, Inversion, Machine Learning, and Uncertainty for Complex Systems group, and a principal faculty member at the Oden Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. He additionally serves as a faculty member of the Graduate School of Computational Sciences.

Over the course of his career, Ghattas has supervised 47 Ph.D. a record that reflects not just longevity but consistent investment in student development. For those who nominated him, however, the numbers tell only part of the story. What distinguished his advising, according to committee member and CSEM graduate student, Fatemeh Beigi, was the clarity and openness he brought to the mentoring relationship from the very beginning.

"After asking about my background and previous research experience, Omar provided detailed descriptions of all the projects going on in the group," one student recalled. "He then explained the possible future directions for each project and discussed the opportunities for me to contribute."

That approach, laying out the full landscape of ongoing work and helping students find where they can make a meaningful contribution, is one that Fatemeh identified as genuinely rare. Graduate research can be a disorienting experience, particularly in the early stages when the path forward is unclear. Advisors who focus narrowly on their own project needs, without sharing the broader context of a group's work, can leave students feeling isolated or uncertain about their role. Ghattas's willingness to be transparent about ongoing projects and collaboratively identify where a student fits is, in Fatemeh's view, what separates impactful advising from adequate advising.

"Nothing we do as faculty is more important than the mentoring we provide to our students. So you can imagine how honored I am to receive this student-led award," stated Ghattas.

The Faculty Advising Award recognizes Oden Institute faculty who demonstrate exceptional dedication to student mentorship and whose guidance has a lasting impact on the researchers they train.