The Pratt School of Engineering is expanding its faculty in the hope of offering more to its students.
Pratt intends to appoint seven new faculty hires for the Fall, Pratt Dean Tom Katsouleas said. Vetting around 14 engineering candidates from all over the country, Pratt is looking for new hires in all four of its departments. The majority of the candidates are still in the application process, though some candidates have already been hired.
“We’re just trying to hire the very best people, independent of their particular area,” said Lawrence Carin, chair of the electrical and computer engineering department and William H. Younger professor of engineering. “It’s not like we’re picking areas per se. We’re trying to get the very best people we can.”
The department of biomedical engineering recently hired Jennifer West as a joint professor of biomedical and mechanical engineering and materials science, said Craig Henriquez, chair and professor of biomedical engineering and professor of computer science. West previously held the title of Isabel C. Cameron professor of bioengineering at Rice University.
The BME department is still searching for two more hires, Henriquez added—one to specialize in medical imaging and the other to partner with the Duke Global Health Institute.
“We have a couple of stellar candidates who I think that with either one of them, we would become the leading place in the county for biomedical engineering in global health,” Katsouleas added.
Henriquez called the recent search for faculty both an expansion and a measure of anticipating the retirement of some professors.
“Our department is looking to expand, we’re a good sized department and we’re a big program with a lot of undergraduate students and lot of graduate students,” he said. “We want our faculty to be in the low 30s and we’re at 29. There are also some faculty members who will be retiring over the next couple of years so we hope that we can maintain our size as they retire.”
The department of mechanical engineering and materials science is still searching for new faculty members, but the department did add other engineers to its faculty earlier this year, said Chair Earl Dowell, William Holland Hall professor. Omar Knio, professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, was recently appointed to lead an initiative involving risk and uncertainty in complex engineering systems.
The recent hires are just one part of Pratt’s current effort to improve the overall quality of the school, Katsouleas said. Several faculty members have already joined Pratt this academic year, such as Wilkins Aquino, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, who previously taught at Cornell University. Aquino, whose focus is inverse modeling, has worked with BME faculty in areas such as predicating stress in airplane wings and ultrasound imaging coordination.
John Albertson, chair of civil and environmental engineering, is currently on sabbatical and was not reachable for comment.
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