TENURE, PROMOTIONS, NEW HIRES BOOST ENGINEERING FACULTY
Drexel Engineering is pleased to announce one tenure award, two faculty promotions and onboarding of six new teaching faculty for the 2023 academic year. These accomplished engineers bring valuable expertise and enthusiasm that will enrich the learning experience in the college.
Andrew Magenau, PhD, will receive tenure and be promoted to associate. Magenau joined Drexel in 2015 following a visiting research professor appointment at Carnegie Mellon University. He oversees the Macromolecular Materials Group, conducting research into developing innovative polymerization platforms that generate functional soft materials addressing needs at the interface of chemistry, biology and materials science. He was selected as a 2022 fellow in the Air Force Research Lab Summer Faculty Fellowship Program at AFRL-Materials and Manufacturing.
Kathleen Short, PhD, will be promoted to associate teaching professor of engineering, leadership and society. Prior to joining Drexel as assistant teaching professor in 2017, Short worked in the construction industry for more than a decade. She serves as a coach for the Construction Competition team and as an advisor for the Construction Honor Society. She is also the faculty advisor for two fraternities and is assisting students in the formation of Drexel’s first organization for Women in Construction. Dr. Short is a recipient of the 2022 Associated School of Construction Region One Teaching Award.
Carlo Ciliberti, PhD, joined the engineering, leadership and society faculty on January 1 as associate teaching professor. He holds a PhD in engineering management from Drexel and had previously developed undergraduate engineering and construction management courses at Rowan University and graduate engineering management courses at the University of Nebraska. He carries over 30 years of industry experience as a project engineer and lead control systems engineer.
Donald Fehlinger, PhD; Neda KaramiMohammadi, PhD; and Liang Zhang, PhD, join the engineering, leadership and society faculty as assistant teaching professors.
Fehlinger earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering at Drexel. His doctoral research focused on fluid and thermodynamics, and as a post-doc he has co-published two conference papers for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers on increasing high school students’ interest in STEM.
KaramiMohammadi earned her doctoral degree in mechanical engineering and has been working as a research associate in that department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has studied nonlinear dynamics, vibrations and control, uncertainty quantification, stochastic process and control, state estimation for nonlinear systems, control of unmanned ground vehicles and energy harvesting. She has previously led courses in applied dynamics, applied mechanics and modeling of engineering systems.
Zhang completed his doctorate at the University of Arizona, studying systems and industrial engineering. His research focused on intelligent transportation systems, machine learning, traffic operations, transportation network analysis and traffic data analysis. He has led classes on engineering management, traffic flow theory and simulation modeling and analysis.
Adams Rackes, PhD, joins as an assistant teaching professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering. Rackes holds three degrees, including his doctoral degree, from Drexel, and an undergraduate degree from Harvard. His doctoral research centered on using machine learning and optimization techniques to enable smarter ventilation control in commercial buildings, to both save energy and improve indoor air quality. In 2015, he earned a Fulbright scholarship to study building ventilation in Brazil.
Somayeh Keshavarz joins as an assistant teaching professor of electrical and computer engineering. Keshavaraz holds master’s degrees in electrical and electronics engineering from Shahrood University of Technology in Iran and in computer science from the University of Central Florida. She is currently completing her doctoral degree at Temple University. She has previously taught courses in machine learning, computer vision, data science and related subjects.