MEMBER BENEFITS These young minds get top tech paper honors Congratulations to the four winners of the 2020 Student/Young Professional Tech Paper Competition! The top two youngprofessional authors are Dhaval Lodaya, Senior Project Engineer at Gamma Technologies LLC, and Dario Lopez-Pintor, post-doctoral researcher with Sandia National Laboratories. The top two student authors are Erika Ziraldo, Ph.D. student at University of Guelph, and George Koutsakis, Ph.D. student at University of Wisconsin. Each winner will receive a $500 gift. They were scheduled to present their papers at WCX, but that event has been cancelled because of coronavirus. Contest judging was by WCX tech session organizes. Update conducted written interview with the four winners. Here's what they had to say. Dhaval Lodaya 2020-01-1007 "Optimization of Fuel Economy Using Optimal Controls on Regulatory and Real-World Driving Cycles" At Gamma Technologies, Lodaya is Senior Project Engineer in Electrified Vehicle Applications. How satisfying is it for you to have been named winner of SAE's tech paper competition? It is very satisfying for me to achieve this UPDATE Dhaval Lodaya Young Professional Best Tech Paper Award as it reaffirms the efforts put not just into writing this paper but also developing the technical solutions like Optimal Controls and Real-World Driving (GT-RealDrive) with the whole team at Gamma Technologies. What is the paper's most important finding or conclusion? We felt the topic of our paper was important because fuel economy norms are getting stricter, while vehicle complexity is also increasing. There is a need for a tool in the market that can capture best-case scenarios using optimal controls for any vehicle architecture without significant development efforts. Solutions like Dynamic Programming (DP) in GT-SUITE provides May 2020 31https://www.doi.org/10.4271/2020-01-1007