[CCoE Notice] Dean's Memo - October 2010

[Lewis, Lindsay R]

To view online, visit http://egr.uh.edu/newsletter/deansmemo/1010.html

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Dear Cullen College Faculty and Staff,

Over the past few months, we have welcomed perhaps the largest cohort of incoming faculty we've had in a single academic semester. With the strategic goal of growing our faculty 30 percent by 2013, we have made great progress with the addition of these eight researchers and scholars:

Haleh Ardebili, Assistant Professor, ME
Craig Glennie, Assistant Professor, CEE
Reagan Herman, Instructional/Research Associate Professor, CEE
Megan Robertson, Assistant Professor, ChBE
Debora Rodrigues, Assistant Professor, CEE
Badrinath Roysam, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor and Chair, ECE
Navin Varadarajan, Assistant Professor, ChBE
Kaspar Willam, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Professor, CEE

Last week, we welcomed a new chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Badrinath "Badri" Roysam. He joins us from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he served as professor of electrical, computer and systems engineering and professor of biomedical engineering. He also served as associate director of the Bernard M. Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center, and co-director of the Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software. Badri received a B.Tech in electronics engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1984 and a M.S. and D. Sc. in electrical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 1987 and 1989, respectively. His research interests include the study of algorithms and high-speed computing for imaging and image analysis with applications in biotechnology and biomedicine. Please join me in welcoming Badri to the Cullen College!

This semester, we were also fortunate to add two National Academy of Engineering members to our faculty roster. Kaspar Willam joined us from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was inducted into the NAE in 2004 for contributions to constitutive modeling and computational failure analysis of concrete and quasi-brittle materials and structures. Anestis "Andy" Veletsos joined us as an adjunct professor. He is the Brown and Root Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University. He was inducted into the NAE in 1979 for contributions to advancements in structural dynamics and earthquake engineering, particularly inelastic behavior and soil-structure interaction. Again, please join me in welcoming these two scholars to the Cullen College!

In addition to announcing our new faculty, here are some other developments and upcoming events that I'd like to share with you:

Professorships: Recently, three of our tenured faculty received university professorships. I'd like to congratulate Vermuri Balakotaiah and Demetre Economou in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering for both being named a Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Chair. I'd also like to congratulate Jack Wolfe in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for being named a Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Professor. Jack served as interim chair of the ECE department over the last year, so I would also like to thank him for his leadership and service.

Petroleum Program: Our undergraduate program in petroleum engineering continues to expand. This semester, more than 70 students have enrolled in our program. Tom Holley, our program director, is aggressively recruiting prospective students throughout the Houston area and has launched a new petroleum program website<http://petro.egr.uh.edu/>.

NRC Rankings: Last week, we received the long-awaited results of the National Academies' National Research Council rankings of doctoral programs. Though five years old, the data placed our chemical engineering doctoral program in the top 20 nationally. Congratulations for a job well done! For specifics on the ranking, be sure to visit our online story<http://www.egr.uh.edu/news/1010/?e=nrc>.

Commissioning: This Thursday at 1 p.m. in the Engineering Commons, Lawrence Schulze from the Department of Industrial Engineering will be commissioned as the Naval Campus Liaison Officer for the region. Please join us at the event.

ELB: The Engineering Leadership Board will convene on Friday, October 29 to review the college's strategic initiatives and provide suggestions on how we can achieve our objectives and goals.

Texas Deans Meeting: UH will host the deans of Texas engineering programs on October 18.

Once again, thank you for your continued support and dedication.

Warm regards,

Joe Tedesco



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