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Finalists named in dean search
Four finalists have been identified in the search for a new dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and they will be visiting UB next week.
The candidates are Liesl Folks, R & D manager, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc., San Jose, Calif.; Hossein Haj-Hariri, professor and chair, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, University of Virginia; Joseph Hartman, professor and chair, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Florida; and Fotis Sotiropoulos, James L. Record Professor of Civil Engineering and director of the St. Anthony Falls Lab, University of Minnesota.
Their CVs can be found on the engineering dean search website.
The new dean will succeed Harvey Stenger Jr., who left the deanship in spring 2011 when he was named UB provost. Rajan Batta, professor of industrial and systems engineering, has been serving as interim dean since then.
The four candidates already have participated in confidential, off-campus interviews. They all will visit UB next week for more extensive sessions, meeting with representative faculty, staff, students, members of the university’s senior leadership team and selected community partners and individuals.
Haj-Hariri will visit on Oct. 1, Folks on Oct. 2, Sotiropoulos on Oct. 3 and Hartman on Oct. 4. The candidates will take part in a public forum from 3:30-4:30 p.m. the day of their visit. The Oct. 1 forum will be held in 145A Student Union, North Campus; the remaining forums will take place in 120 Clemens Hall, North.
Search committee co-chairs Venu Govindaraju, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Bruce Pitman, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, encourage members of the UB community to attend the forums “to learn more about the finalists and to engage in conversation with them about the future of UB.”
“Your participation is also a signal to these accomplished candidates that the UB community is genuinely invested in the search for its academic leadership,” they said in an email to the university community.
The co-chairs ask that members of the university community submit their confidential feedback on the candidates to engineeringdeansearch@buffalo.edu no later than Oct. 7.
The search committee will prepare a report on the finalists for President Satish K. Tripathi and Provost Charles Zukoski, who will make the final decision.
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