UCI Boosts Engineering Faculty as Enrollment Grows
The Henry Samueli School of Engineering continues to add to its faculty.
Earlier this month, the University of California, Irvine engineering school said it hired three full-time professors who specialize in nanoscale,or miniature,biomedical device engineering: Marc J. Madou, William C. Tang and Abraham P. Lee.
The hires come as the school’s enrollment is projected to jump 14.5% to 2,700 undergraduates and graduates this year. Meanwhile, funding is up 36% to $26.6 million for the 2002 fiscal year.
To keep pace, UCI’s engineering faculty has increased to 88 professors from 70 since last summer. The school has five engineering departments, including a biomedical engineering discipline created earlier this year.
Critics of the university have said it doesn’t graduate enough engineers to keep up with growth in Orange County’s technology sector.
The recent hires come on top of July’s high-profile recruitment of aerospace expert, Satya Atluri, who holds the newly-created position of Henry Samueli “von Karman” Chair in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering. He will head the school’s center for aerospace research and education, a program he is bringing with him from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Atluri received the National Academy of Engineering’s Outstanding Achievement Award in 1995. He is also the recipient of the Excellence in Aviation Award and the President’s National Medal of Technology Distinguished Service Award, among others.
His current projects include a mathematical model to pinpoint when helicopter rotors and other heavily used components fail. Atluri also is working with the Federal Aviation Administration to design small, inexpensive sensors to wirelessly match airport passengers to their baggage.
The other hires also specialize in miniature device making:
& #149; Madou is the author of the textbook considered the bible for microscale research, “Fundamentals of Microfabrication.” He comes from San Diego-based Nanogen Inc., where he was vice president of advanced technology. He also has worked in academia, most recently at Ohio State University. Madou received a doctoral degree in semiconductor electrochemistry at the Solid-State Physics Laboratory at the Rijksuniversiteit in Ghent, Belgium.
& #149; Tang most recently led the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s expansion of its microelectromechanical systems programs. He had a stint leading the microelectromechanical systems program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech. Tang’s work includes miniscule crash sensors he created and patented while working for Ford Motor Co. Tang earned a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley.
& #149; Lee comes from the National Cancer Institute and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He develops microdevices that offer a less invasive way to diagnose and treat human disease. The millimeter-sized device he developed to patch brain aneurysms won a Federal Laboratory Consortium award for excellence in technology transfer and is in the process of being commercialized. Lee holds a doctoral degree in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley, where he and Tang met more than a decade ago.
,Mike Mason
