ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Science can be as dynamic as the researchers who explore it. The Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers is recognizing three Sandia National Laboratories engineers who pushed beyond the boundaries of linear research to expand their knowledge and impact across multiple fields.
Mechanical engineer Anton Sumali earned a Career Achievement Award, chemist and nanoengineer Bishnu Khanal received a Professional Achievement Award and transportation systems engineer Esther Woon Lyn John was honored with a Promising Professional Achievement Award.
Each has a unique journey but with striking similarities — constantly moving forward, continually learning, pivoting to new endeavors and applying past experience to master fresh challenges along the way.
Anton Sumali: Career Achievement Award
Sumali began his career in 1987 as a control systems engineer in the petroleum industry in Southeast Asia after earning a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from Indonesia’s Bandung Institute of Technology.
“It was a thriving business with a lot of money, but I found it uninspiring,” Sumali said.
After a few years, he realized he enjoyed the engineering and learning aspects, but not the business side, so he returned to school, earning advanced degrees in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech.
“It took me too long to earn my master’s and doctorate. As intrigued as I was with engineering, I learned something about myself,” he said. “I loved school — learning, exploring and exchanging ideas. I was drawn to academia and wanted to stay.”
And, so he did, landing an assistant professor position at Purdue University.
Then came the Sept. 11 attacks, which affected people he knew, including his Ph.D. student and her family. Its impact on Sumali was profound.
“At that time, I happened to sit in on a Sandia Labs student recruiting presentation and was compelled by the national security work being done here,” he said.
He took a year’s leave from Purdue and worked in structural dynamics at Sandia. He was hooked and joined the labs full time in 2002 working on micro electromechanical systems.
“I enjoyed it so much, partly because it was an extension of my Ph.D. work,” he said.
Over the next decade, his skills as an engineer and manager synthesized with his passion for learning, teaching and mentoring. That made him a natural fit to establish and lead the AutonomyNM Intern Institute, a Sandia innovation hub supporting advanced flight and space systems focused on sensing, navigation, guidance and control for hypersonic vehicles.
In addition to making breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning, Sumali helped energize the institute, which brings in promising university students each summer.
“That’s exciting for me,” he said. “We develop new talent from top universities to actually apply AI to national security.”
Bishnu Khanal: Professional Achievement Award
Khanal grew up in a small village in western Nepal, where he was encouraged to focus on school — a focus that sparked a lifelong interest in science, math and problem-solving.
After earning his undergraduate and master’s degrees in chemistry in Nepal, Khanal stepped into academia as a graduate chemistry lecturer at various colleges in Kathmandu.
“I didn’t know what came after earning my master’s, but a Ph.D. seemed like the next step,” he said.
In 2005, he was accepted to Rice University in Houston to pursue a doctorate in chemistry and nanotechnology. There, he excelled in nanomaterials and nanotechnology research and earned several national awards and fellowships.
Khanal joined Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2009 for postdoctoral research in semiconductor quantum dots and rods. He worked briefly as a research and development engineer at Micron Technology before joining Intel in 2011 as a research and development process engineer. There, he led advanced process development and technology transfers.
In 2018, he joined Sandia to lead advanced optical photolithography research and development activities at the Microsystems, Engineering, Science and Applications facility. He quickly became an innovator in patterning technologies, including complementary metal-oxide semiconductors and quantum computing.
In 2022, Khanal was selected as manager to lead Sandia’s Materials Mechanics and Tribology department. Today, he leads a diverse team focusing on commercial electronics components and their surveillance.
His dynamic career often summons knowledge from previous jobs, whether it’s product development, quality assurance or management styles.
“So much of my previous knowledge is transferrable to present day problem-solving,” he said. “It seems that almost every skill set I have acquired can be applied to a new challenge.”
Outside work, Khanal is establishing a trust to support underprivileged students in his home village in Nepal.
“I want every child to know the possibilities that exist beyond the world they live in,” he said. “Some kids just need that little extra support, like I did. Who knows what they can grow up to accomplish?”
Esther Woon Lyn John: Promising Professional Achievement Award
In just 10 years, John has held influential positions at Cornell University, the World Bank and now Sandia Labs. At Sandia, she has applied her unique skills in data science and analytics to create actionable national security tools, including anomaly threat mapping for body scanners and logistics models for nuclear deterrence programs.
Her academic path began in math and continued into operations research and programming, focusing on modeling and simulation, culminating in a Ph.D. in transportation systems engineering with an emphasis in transport economics.
“I liked math and the logic and reasoning it presented,” John said. “But I didn’t know anything about computer science until undergrad.”
In her second year of undergrad, a compulsory computer course led to a passion for programming, eventually shaping her focus on modeling and simulation.
During her Ph.D., she became deeply engaged in systems engineering modeling.
“The math, logic and reasoning kept presenting themselves in various forms, like behavioral economics and transportation,” she said.
Professionally, John’s journey has mirrored that interdisciplinary approach. Despite the lack of obvious connections, none of her professional pursuits are happenstance.
“My career path has evolved through my experiences and networking,” John said. After a colleague from Cornell joined the World Bank, she was brought on as a transportation engineering consultant focusing on port infrastructure — experience that now ties directly to her global supply chain and security research at Sandia.
At the Labs, John devises simulation-based logistics models and data-driven analytics for the Transportation Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection, the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Energy.
“There are so many different projects to work on, and we need a different approach for every single one of them,” she said.
The breadth of her studies and prior work foster unique approaches to current challenges.
“I find modeling and simulation — translating real-world problems into a computer programs — enable us to explore different scenarios, develop solutions and present them to the client,” she said. “That exploration is really interesting for me.”
She applies these skills to a wide range of topics: transportation research, energy policy, community detection algorithms, rail delivery and more.
John is also a prolific mentor to local middle and high school students, as well as Sandia interns and staff.
“I’ve always enjoyed mentoring,” she said. “It’s the one thing from academia that I really miss. There’s more than one way to learn, and I learn so much from people with whom I interact.”
Each award recipient must be actively working in an IT, engineering or scientific field; have made significant, measurable contributions; and demonstrate consistent commitment to the growth and advancement of their discipline.