Fred Leroy “Bud” Suddath was a pioneer, one of the scientists who came together to help form what would become the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, and the first vice president for information technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

When he died suddenly on June 17, 1992, his loss was felt throughout the Georgia Tech community. So his family, friends, and colleagues established an award in his honor.

Every year since, the F.L. “Bud” Suddath Memorial Award has been given to a Ph.D. student who has at least one year remaining in his or her program and who has demonstrated a significant research achievement in biology, biochemistry, or biomedical engineering. This year, that student is Jordan Ciciliano, who earned the top prize in the 2016 Suddath Award competition.

Ciciliano is a bioengineering student whose home school is the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. She’s a member of Wilbur Lam’s lab in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, where her research interests are biomechanics, diagnostics, microfluidics, hematology, and oncology.

As winner of the $1,000 top prize, her name will be engraved on the award plaque and she’ll deliver a presentation on her research, entitled, “Developing microfluidic approaches to solve longstanding hematologic questions," at the Suddath Symposium (Feb. 11-12 at the Petit Institute).

A second place Suddath Award ($500) went to Eric Parker, a chemistry and biochemistry grad student in the lab of Facundo Fernandez. Third place ($250) went to Jose García, a bioengineering student who works in the lab of Andrés García.

The Suddath Awards were announced during the Petit Institute’s annual holiday party in December 2015, along with a number of other awards and honors for institute faculty, staff and students.

The evening’s other award winners were:

• Al Merrill, Krishnendu Roy and Fred Vannberg took home the faculty awards. Merrill is a professor in the School of Biology, where he is the Smithgall Chair in Molecular Cell Biology. Roy is a professor in the Coulter Department and director of the Center for ImmunoEngineering at Georgia Tech. Vannberg is assistant professor in the School of Biology.

• Trainee awards went to Kyle Blum (grad student in the lab of Lena Ting), Josh Hooks (Brandon Dixon’s lab) and Claire Segar (Ed Botchwey’s lab).

• Staff awards went to Karen Ethier and Floyd Wood.