Three finalists named for engineering dean post
A search committee recommended to Chancellor David Ward on Friday (April 23) three finalists for dean of the UW–Madison College of Engineering.
Finalists are:
- Eduardo D. Glandt, interim dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science;
- Julio M. Ottino, chair of the department of chemical engineering at Northwestern University;
- Paul S. Peercy, president of SEMI/SEMATECH, an Austin, Tex.-based technical consortium for the U.S. semiconductor industry.
“The finalists emerged from a very impressive, international pool of candidates, and we had many quality people to choose from,” said W. Harmon Ray, chair of the 18-member search committee assigned to find a successor to Dean John Bollinger. On July 1, Bollinger will step down after 18 years as dean of the college.
A pool of more than 150 candidates either applied or were nominated for the position. The new dean will oversee a college with roughly 3,200 undergraduates, 1,000 graduate students and annual instructional and research expenditures of $100 million.
Ray said the search committee focused on finding a proven leader capable of promoting the college’s diverse goals of teaching, research, technology transfer and outreach. The top candidates also needed to show an ability to enhance the college’s national reputation and a knowledge of emerging technologies shaping the field.
Ward will invite the candidates back to campus for interviews with top-level administrators and make a final decision in the near future.
Glandt has been interim dean of the University of Pennsylvania engineering school since 1998. He is a professor and past chair of the school’s chemical engineering department. Prior to joining Penn in 1975, Glandt was a researcher with the National Institute for Industrial Technology in Buenos Aires, Argentina and an adjunct professor with the University of Buenos Aires.
He received his masters and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, in 1975 and 1977 respectively. Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1996, Glandt’s research interests include classical and statistical thermodynamics, and theories of liquids and liquid mixtures.
Ottino has been chair of Northwestern’s chemical engineering department since 1992, and is also the department’s Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical Engineering. Prior to joining Northwestern, Ottino held faculty and research positions with the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Stanford University and the University of Minnesota.
Ottino received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1979 from the University of Minnesota. He is a 1997 member of the National Academy of Engineering and 1996 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). His research areas include fluid mechanics of mixing, granular materials and flow and materials processing.
Peercy has been president of SEMI/SEMATECH since 1995. The not-for-profit consortium includes more than 160 U.S. companies that are part of the semiconductor industry. Prior to that position, Peercy was director of microelectronics and photonics at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.
Peercy received his masters in physics in 1963 and Ph.D. in physics in 1966 from UW–Madison. He is a fellow of AAAS and the American Physical Society. His research spans several areas of solid state and materials physics and engineering, including ferroelectricity, microelectronics and photonics. He is author or co-author of more than 175 papers and holds two patents.