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More SEAS candidates to visit campus
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
Two additional candidates for the position of dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have been selected to participate in on-campus interviews.
Hassan Aref, Reynolds Metals Professor in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics and former dean of the College of Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, will be on campus today and tomorrow. Marwan Simaan, Bell of PA/Bell Atlantic Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, will visit UB Monday and Tuesday.
They join a pool of finalists that includes Harvey G. Stenger Jr., professor of chemical engineering and former dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Lehigh University, and Seshu B. Desu, Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Stenger was on campus April 4 and 5; Desu's two-day visit ends today.
While on campus, the candidates are meeting with faculty, staff, students, members of the university's senior leadership and selected community partners and individuals, said Alexander Cartwright, chair of the SEAS Dean Search Committee and professor of electrical engineering.
The search committee also plans to hold open meetings with the candidates for members of the general university community. The open meeting with Desu will be held today from 9:45-10:15 a.m. in the Jeannette Martin Room, 567 Capen Hall, North Campus. The meeting with Aref will be held from 9:45-10:15 a.m. tomorrow in 414 Bonner Hall, North Campus. The meeting with Simaan will be held from 3:45-4:15 p.m. Tuesday in 414 Bonner.
Cartwright noted that feedback from a wide variety of campus constituents is essential to a successful search, and encouraged interested individuals to participate in the meetings with the candidates.
More information about the candidates is available at http://www. buffalo.edu/engineering-dean/. Comments may be sent to engineering-dean@vpsa. buffalo.edu.
Aref joined Virginia Tech in 2003 as dean of the College of Engineering and Reynolds Metals Professor, an endowed position on the faculty. He served as dean until 2005. He is tenured in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics.
He previously spent 10 years as a professor and head of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, except for a one-year appointment as interim chief information officer for the institution. Prior to his tenure at the University of Illinois, he was a professor of fluid mechanics at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD). While at UCSD, he also served as Chief Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Aref received an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and earned a doctorate in physics, with a minor in mechanical and aerospace engineering, from Cornell University. After serving as a postdoctoral research associate in the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics at Cornell, he joined the engineering faculty at Brown University as an assistant professor, where he remained until he joined UCSD.
Aref is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award and the 2000 Otto Laporte Award of the American Physical Society, Division of Fluid Dynamics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Mechanics, the Danish Center for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics and the World Innovation Foundation.
His research interests are in theoretical and computational fluid mechanics, particularly vortex dynamics; the application of chaos to fluid flows; and the mechanics of foams. He is co-editor of two books and author of some 80 papers in premier journals.
A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Simaan joined the Pittsburgh faculty as an associate professor of electrical engineering in 1976. He was named full professor in 1985 and Bell of PA/Bell Atlantic Professor in 1989. He previously was a visiting assistant professor of electrical engineering and postdoctoral research associate with the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His research interests are mainly in the areas of optimization and control, signal processing, telecommunication and knowledge-based signal processing and control. His most recent research has emphasized the use of a game theoretic approach for the modeling and control of military operations involving unmanned aerial vehicles. For the past six years he has been involved in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Joint Force Air Component Commander and Mixed Initiative Control of Automa programs. He also is involved in an NSF project on the feedback control of ventricular assist devices, which often are used as a bridge to mechanically support patients awaiting heart transplantation.
He has edited or co-edited four books and more than 60 journal issues, and has authored or co-authored more than 100 archival journal papers and book chapters, 160 papers in conference proceedings, 24 industry technical reports and one patent.
He received a bachelor's degree from the American University of Beirut, a master's degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—all in electrical engineering.
Simaan is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a Fellow of the American Society of Engineering Education and a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Electromagnetics Academy, Eta Kappa Nu and Sigma Xi.