Jonathan Singer Awarded Mary W. Raisler Distinguished Teaching Chair in Mechanical Engineering
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) associate professor Jonathan Singer was recently awarded the Mary W. Raisler Distinguished Teaching Chair in Mechanical Engineering.
The Raisler Chair was established by Harold K. Raisler ENG’26 in memory of his first wife to recognize and foster excellence in teaching and scholarly activity’s in the MAE department. Singer’s three-year appointment to the chair honors Singer’s past achievements while encouraging and helping to support his continuing exceptional teaching and research.
“I’m gratified that my efforts to incorporate scalable research-inspired techniques into coursework are being recognized through this honor. Teaching and mentoring students is one of the most rewarding parts of my position.”
Rutgers University previously acknowledged Singer’s contributions to teaching with a 2020-21 Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence Award. The award honors recently promoted and tenured faculty whose contributions to teaching during their early years at Rutgers has been truly outstanding.
Singer was also a 2019-20 recipient of the Rutgers University Provost Award for Excellence in Innovative Teaching, which recognized the success of his non-traditional approach to active learning.
“Ever since I first worked in a lab as an undergraduate, I understood both the value of hands-on research and how difficult it would be to give this experience to every student. Since then, I’ve been motivated to incorporate hard-to-translate experiences of research into coursework,” Singer explains.
“Having the opportunity to try new approaches is always exciting and this chair will give me the resources to continue to develop new methods and extend the reach of existing ones. I thank the Advisory Committee for this recognition, the Raisler family for establishing the chair, and the MAE department and SoE for their continued support of my education and research initiatives,” Singer says.
His primary research interest is the generation of hierarchically structured materials via scalable micro/nanomanufacturing processes to incorporate the extraordinary properties of nanostructures into complex geometries. Targeted applications of hybrid lithographic techniques include alternative energy, micro-robotics, and medical implants. His research projects have not only received funding from Rutgers, but also from federal grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA, the Office of Naval Research – which honored him with a Young Investigator Award in 2021 – and the National Science Foundation. He has also received industry support from Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and 3M Company.
