Phillip Ansell receives Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research

For his research and leadership in the field of sustainable aviation, Phillip Ansell is receiving the 2025 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research, associate professor level in the Department of Aerospace Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Achieving aircraft sustainability—from fuels to designs to operations—is perhaps the biggest issue facing the industry today. Ansell’s fresh insights in sustainable aviation led him to reach beyond aviation to include many other disciplines and perspectives.

Ansell looks to the future of aircraft design and analysis as Director of the Illinois Center for Sustainable Aviation, but he takes the aircraft technology conversation much further by connecting with people who work in energy, operations, safety, economics and policies.

For example, Ansell heads the NASA-funded Center for High-Efficiency Electrical Technologies for Aircraft—a multi-disciplinary research consortium that has produced over 80 publications to date, covering advancements from sub-components to full aircraft systems.  One of the outcomes of CHEETA is an entire book called ‘Aircraft Cryogenics’ that Ansell co-authored with colleagues from Illinois and General Electric.

Ansell’s vision was to look a step beyond near-term technologies, mostly biofuels, to the use of hydrogen and or to even reconsider the entire aircraft design. This concept came at a time when hydrogen energy applications for aviation were extremely limited. Now, hydrogen energy concepts are a prominent concept within the aeronautics research community, with CHEETA setting the international standard for the design of such systems.

He continues to serve as an international authority on the design of hydrogen aircraft, producing new collaborations and programs with the government, industry and startups.

Ansell established the need for a system-level view as a cornerstone of sustainable aviation. He is leading a research program to study the overall means of minimizing energy intensity and emissions across an entire energy life cycle of new aircraft concepts. He has also established a connection with JetZero, a blended wing body aircraft design and manufacturing firm co-founded by Illinois alumni, which has resulted in high-profile sustainable aircraft research program by NASA.

Ansell earned his B.S. degree from Penn State and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from U of I. He joined the faculty in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Illinois in 2015 as an assistant professor. In 2019, Ansell received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research at the assistant professor level. He was promoted to associate professor in 2021.