The award which highlights one scientist’s commitment to excellence in “experimentation and laboratory instruction.”
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 academic projects. 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.
His pedagogical approach, which emphasizes experiential learning, has now earned him the 2025 ASEE Robert G. Quinn Award, which highlights one scientist’s commitment to excellence in “experimentation and laboratory instruction.” It’s yet another honor in a long list of plaudits — and another concrete sign of appreciation.
“It’s more incentive to keep moving in this direction of serving our students,” Levendis says.
In 2020, he was elected to the National Academy of Inventors, an honor reserved for individuals whose inventions “have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society.”
As part of the award, Levendis will receive a $5,000 honorarium, a medal and an inscribed plaque during this year’s ASEE annual Conference and Exposition in Montreal, which takes place June 22-25.
Part of what continues to drive Levendis is the need to discover ways to make renewable biomass and waste biomass an effective substitute for coal. When coal is burned, it releases numerous harmful pollutants into the atmosphere, including mercury, arsenic and other heavy metals, as well as gases that can cause respiratory problems or create acid rain.
Levendis says he is continuing to advance the combustion of iron as a supplemental fuel source, with the potential to replace coal and other hydrocarbon fuels. He has also explored how to use the discarded parts of plants, such as corn or rice — the husks and stalks, for example — as fuel.
“At the moment, I’m continuing to work on that to find out how iron burns, at what temperatures, and so on,” Levendis says.