Carnegie Mellon University Announces New Endowed Chairs in College of Engineering
The College of Engineering announced the selection of eight new endowed chairs to recognize outstanding scholarly achievement. The esteemed recipients are listed below.
Endowed chairs are one of the highest recognitions that can be awarded to a faculty member. They enable the college to recruit and retain the best and the brightest faculty to deliver on the breakthrough innovation and scholarly work we are known for in the world. Endowed chairs are made possible by the generosity of donors, whose support builds the college’s strength in engineering through its world-class faculty.
Additional thanks go to Burcu Akinci and Greg Lowry, as University Professors, released their existing professorships to be used by others and became Hamerschlag University Professors. These esteemed professorships are named after Arthur Arton Hamerschlag, the electrical and mechanical engineer who served as the first president of what is now known as Carnegie Mellon University.
Amit Acharya(opens in new window)
Paul P. Christiano Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Acharya is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering(opens in new window) and is a member of the Mechanics, Materials, and Computing research group. His research interests are in the areas of continuum mechanics, theoretical materials science, and applied mathematics. Acharya looks at how structural imperfections, or defects, in crystalline materials interact and evolve.
Michael Bockstaller(opens in new window)
Alcoa Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
Bockstaller is a professor of materials science and engineering(opens in new window) and the director of the AFRL Center of Excellence Center for Data-Driven Design of Multifunctional Material Systems. Bockstaller is a world leader in heterogeneous polymer-based materials, and his research aims to engineer materials with enhanced properties that contribute to the solution of contemporary material challenges.
Kaushik Dayal(opens in new window)
Walter J. Blenko, Sr. Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Dayal is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Dayal’s research interests are in the area of theoretical and computational multiscale methods applied to problems in materials science, with particular focus on bridging from atomic to continuum scales in the context of functional behavior, nonequilibrium response and electromagnetic effects.
Erica Fuchs(opens in new window)
Kavčić-Moura Professor of Engineering and Public Policy
Fuchs is a professor in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy(opens in new window). Her research focuses on the development, commercialization and global manufacturing of emerging technologies, and national policy in that context. She founded and leads Carnegie Mellon’s Critical Technology Strategy Initiative. As part of that initiative, she received a one-year, $4M NSF grant to lead the National Network for Critical Technology Assessment, a consortium of 13 universities and 22 leading investigators in her area.
Paulina Jaramillo(opens in new window)
Trustee Professor of Engineering and Public Policy
Jaramillo is a professor in engineering and public policy and a world-leading expert on life cycle assessment, energy systems, decarbonization, climate change impacts, and energy access and development in the Global South. She has led the Open Energy Outlook, an energy systems modeling activity that is one of a handful of “key initiatives” of CMU’s Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation(opens in new window).
Sean Qian(opens in new window)
H.J. Heinz III Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Qian is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy(opens in new window). He directs the Mobility Data Analytics Center at CMU. In 2020, Qian founded a CMU technology spinoff firm, TraffiQure Technologies, to commercialize AI/ML technologies in the infrastructure and mobility service domain.
Costa Samaras(opens in new window)
Trustee Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Samaras is the director of the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His research focuses on the pathways to clean, climate-safe, equitable and secure energy and infrastructure systems. He also directs the Center for Engineering and Resilience for Climate Adaptation and is the director of the Power Sector Carbon Index.
Conrad Tucker(opens in new window)
Trustee Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Conrad Tucker is the director of Carnegie Mellon University in Africa(opens in new window) and associate dean for international affairs-Africa, as well as a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering(opens in new window). His research explores the use of machine learning methods that predictively improve the outcome of product design solutions through the acquisition, fusion and mining of large-scale, publicly-available data.