A search advisory committee has been formed to work with an executive search firm to find a dean for the Tickle College of Engineering.
Steve Mangum, dean of the Haslam College of Business, will chair the committee.
Other members are:
- Suresh Babu, UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair for Advanced Manufacturing
- Chris Cox, department head and Robert M. Condra Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
- BillEversole, CEO of Bandspeed Inc., alumnus, and member of the board of advisors for the Tickle College of Engineering
- Paul Frymier, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and interim associate dean for faculty affairs in the Tickle College of Engineering
- John Kobza, professor and head of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
- Rachel McCord, lecturer and research assistant professor in the Jerry E. Stoneking engage Engineering Fundamentals program
- Nicole McFarlane, associate professor in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
- Jeff Nichols, associate laboratory director, Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate, Oak Ridge National Lab
- Claudia Rawn, associate professor of materials science and engineering and director of the Center for Materials Processing
- Brian Shupe, director of development for the Tickle College of Engineering
- Gila Stein, Prados Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
- Mark Whorton, executive director of the UT Space Institute
- Brian Wirth, UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair for Computational Nuclear Engineering
The engineering dean search was suspended over the summer to allow for the transition of the new provost.
In August, Mark Dean, the John Fisher Distinguished Professor in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, became interim dean. He stepped in when Lynne Parker, who had been interim dean since May when Dean Wayne T. Davis became interim chancellor, left to serve as assistant director of artificial intelligence for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor David Manderscheid said the search comes as exciting things are happening in the college.
“The Tickle College of Engineering is seen significant growth in recent years and is poised for even bigger things, having just broken ground on another state-of-the-art facility,” he said.
Since 2005, the college’s student population has grown by 94 percent; since 2012, PhD enrollment has increased 40 percent, and annual PhD graduates have nearly doubled. The full-time faculty has also grown by 50 percent, and annual research expenditures have risen to more than $81 million. The college has recently opened three buildings—the Min H. Kao Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building, the John D. Tickle Engineering Building, and the Joint Institute for Advanced Materials—and construction recently commenced on a $129 million, 228-000 square-foot new engineering complex, set to open in 2021.