Roger Narayan and Yaroslava Yingling each received the 2025 R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research and Extension, the most prestigious award the College of Engineering at NC State University presents to individual faculty members.

Both were honored on Nov. 17 during a ceremony at Duke Energy Hall in the James B. Hunt Jr. Library on Centennial Campus. They each delivered a 15-minute presentation on their career highlights.

This is the first year two faculty members were presented with an R.J. Reynolds Award, which will be the standard moving forward.

Each winner receives $25,000 over a five-year period to support their research, teaching and extension work.

At the ceremony, Krista Walton, vice chancellor for research and innovation at NC State, noted that the breadth and depth of both awardees’ research is only possible at NC State.

“The College of Engineering continues to lead in creating transformative technology and educating the engineers and computer scientists who are going to shape our future,” she said. “And so this R.J. Reynolds award, I think, really recognizes not just individual excellence, but really the culture of innovation and mentorship that defines this college.”

Jim Pfaendtner, the Louis Martin-Vega Dean of the College of Engineering, thanked the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company for supporting NC State research since the award’s inception in 1981. He acknowledged the long history of important research accomplished by past award winners.

“We all know the value of every dollar invested in research, teaching and extension goes well beyond,” he said. “That return on investment is amazing. Over and over again, we show the value of innovation coming out of our research labs.”

About the 2025 Award Winners

Roger Narayan

Roger Narayan, Distinguished Professor in the Lampe Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) and faculty member in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, is a leading expert in biomedical microdevices.

In the over two decades since graduating from NC State with a materials science degree, Narayan has explored the various ways in which 3D printing can change the landscape of medicine. The R.J. Reynolds Award recognizes his influential and impactful work through research, teaching and outreach.

“One of the great benefits of it is that it allows for being able to define structures with infinite complexity,” he said of his 3D printing research. “You can make structures with precise small-scale features for medical device applications such as biosensing and drug delivery.”

Narayan’s research group is currently creating wearable devices that contain arrays of miniaturized hollow cones called microneedles that are created using a 3D printing process.

“We’re able to develop customized medical device-based strategies to treat medical conditions that are very hard to treat with conventional approaches, like a skin cream or through intravenous administration,” he said.

His main research focus is the use of 3D printing processes based on the polymerization of a liquid precursor to create microneedles, sensors and scaffolds for tissue engineering. He is also working to develop more biologically friendly materials for use as the feedstock materials for 3D printing.

Narayan is also the author of over 350 publications, has held numerous 3D printing workshops and served as the 2024 Fulbright chair at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Narayan is the first BME professor to receive this award.

Yaroslava Yingling

In her extensive career, Yaroslava (Yara) Yingling, associate head and Kobe Steel Distinguished Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), has built a research program that bridges molecular modeling, soft and biological materials, nanotechnology and AI-driven discovery. Her presentation framed this work as “high entropy, low activation energy,” a career constantly exploring new directions.

A central theme of her research is biomimetics: using nature’s molecular building blocks as design templates for advanced materials. One prominent example is her work with DNA and RNA, which her group models as charged polymers with intrinsic molecular recognition, enabling the design of self-assembled capsules, gene-delivery architectures and functional nucleic-acid–based nanostructures.

“For materials scientists, DNA and RNA are not just genetic codes,” she said. “They’re programmable biopolymers with built-in molecular recognition.”

Yingling and her collaborators have also developed histone-mimic nanoparticles that compact nucleic acids and other functional nanomaterials, as well as all-atom methods to optimize metal and magnetic nanoparticle assemblies for sensing, delivery and responsive soft matter.

Yingling highlighted the need for tight integration between research and mentoring. The Yingling Research Group includes undergraduate researchers, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and interdisciplinary collaborators. That commitment to education is rooted in her own background: she comes from a multi-generational STEM family, and both of her parents were professors.

More recently, Yingling has become a leading voice in AI-enabled materials science, developing workflows that unify experimental, simulation and characterization data into a common space. This enables robust AI-driven prediction, optimization and accelerated materials discovery.

“AI allows us to bring simulations, experiments and theory into the same space, so we can learn more from data than any single approach could offer,” she said.

Yingling is a past recipient of multiple academic and research awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the American Chemical Society Open Eye Young Investigator Award and NC State Alumni Association Outstanding Research Award. She is the eighth faculty member in the MSE department to win the award.