Dartmouth Engineer

Margaret Ackerman has been appointed assistant professor. Her research is in protein engineering, biotherapeutics, vaccine technology, and engineering immune responses. Her Ph.D. is from MIT.

Eric Fossum has been appointed research professor. He previously held positions at Columbia University, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and in industry. His Ph.D. is from Yale.

Michael Gerst has been promoted to research assistant professor. His research is on integrated environmental assessment and modeling of material and energy systems and measuring the sustainability of anthropogenic systems. His Ph.D. is from Yale.

Venkataramanan Krishnaswamy has been promoted to assistant professor. He does research on near-infrared imaging. His Ph.D. is from the University of Alabama.

Jifeng Liu has been appointed assistant professor. His research is on nanophotonics. His Ph.D. is from MIT.

Vicki May has been appointed associate professor. Her research includes inquiry-based learning. Her Ph.D. is from Stanford.

Assistant Professor Petia Vlahovska, on the faculty since 2006, has taken a position as an assistant professor at Brown University. She remains an adjunct professor at Thayer.

Professor Ursula Gibson ’76, a nanomaterials specialist, has left Thayer School after 20 years on the faculty to take up an appointment at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She remains an adjunct professor at Thayer.

FAREWELL: Professor Ursula Gibson ’76, right, has taken a position at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, which her husband, Thayer adjunct professor Ulf Österberg, joined last year. “It’s good to shake things up once in a while — it improves perspective,” says Gibson. As for her 20 years at Thayer, she says, “I have enjoyed every course I taught, but ENGS 1: ‘Everyday Technology’ has a special place in my heart. The broad perspective brought by students from all over campus was a special pleasure, and the opportunity to convince them that they could understand and modify modern technological products was a treat.” Photograph by Douglas Fraser.

Reza Olfati-Saber, an expert in systems dynamics and control, recently joined the faculty as an assistant professor of engineering sciences. He was a postdoctoral fellow at CalTech in control and dynamical systems after completing his doctoral studies in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT in 2001. He was also a visiting assistant research engineer in mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA, working on swarms, sensor networks and complex networks.

Eugene Santos, professor of engineering sciences, brings expertise in modern statistical and probabilistic methods with applications to intelligent systems, uncertain reasoning and decision science. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science at Brown.

Petia Vlahovska will become an assistant professor of engineering sciences in July 2006. Interested in the dynamics of complex fluids, she is spending the 2005-06 academic year at the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces. Vlahovska earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering at Yale.

Metin Akay, associate professor and senior lecturer, recently became a full professor at the Fulton School of Engineering at Arizona State University, where he will help build a new department of biomedical informatics.

Hamid Dehghani, assistant professor, became a lecturer at the University of Exeter, U.K. He will also continue medical imaging research at Thayer School as an adjunct professor.

Charles Wyman, Thayer School’s Paul E. and Joan H. Queneau Distinguished Professor in Environmental Engineering Design, became the Ford Professor in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Riverside, where he will continue his research in alternative energy and fuels. He will remain on the Thayer School faculty as an adjunct professor. To read about his work on ethanol, see Power Plants.

For more photos, visit our Faculty and Instructors set on Flickr.