Sascha Engel, a political science instructor at Virginia Tech, has been named the 2016 Outstanding Doctoral Student for the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. In addition to being honored at the upcoming Graduate Student Awards Banquet, he will receive a $500 honorarium.

Originally from Frankfurt, Germany, Engel first joined the Department of Political Science during the fall semester of 2010 as a graduate exchange student from the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany. He returned to Virginia Tech in 2012 to begin his doctoral studies in political thought through ASPECT—the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought—while teaching undergraduate courses in political theory.

In March 2016, Engel defended his dissertation on the political economy of the current Eurozone crisis.