The winners of the 2023 NC State Sustainability Awards were announced during the Celebration of NC State Sustainability on April 18. Alexandra Akins was one of the honorees for outstanding sustainability achievements.

Alie Akins is a senior in the Department of Nuclear Engineering, in which she has published multiple papers, presented at prestigious conferences and developed an AI-based anomaly detection algorithm during an internship at the Argonne National Laboratory. In 2021 she received an extremely competitive research award from the College of Engineering Women & Minority Summer Research Program (WMSRP) to work with Dr. Xu Wu, assistant professor of nuclear engineering. She continues work in the area of Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) methods to solve simplified nuclear reactor simulation model.

Additionally, she serves as the resource conservation team coordinator for the Sustainability Stewards at NC State and has been part of significant projects, such as the solar bus stop on Dan Allen Drive and Solar Space at Gardner Arboretum. Alie is currently working to install a pollinator garden at Talley Student Union along with organizing multiple events to engage students in conservation, including the campus-wide Energy and Water Competition.