Academia On the Move, October 2013

Earlier this month, Gregory L. Fenves, Ph.D., began serving as provost of the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Fenves, NY D ’79, has been serving as the dean of the UT Cockrell School of Engineering since 2008. According to the article from The Alcalde, the official publication of the Texas Exes, “as provost his focus will be on undergraduate education, increasing the number of highly ranked graduate programs, recruiting, and building the Dell Medical School.”

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Co-inventor of the personal computer Mark E. Dean, Ph.D., will join the University of Tennessee’s College of Engineering this fall as the John Fisher Distinguished Professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science. Most recently, Dean served as chief technology officer for IBM Middle East and Africa, based in Dubai.

He holds “three of the nine original patents on the computer that all PCs are based upon, and more than forty patents overall.” Dean was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1996 and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2001. Read more biographical information on Dean here

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Sharon L. Wood, Ph.D., began her appointment, on October 1, as the interim dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Wood, VA A ’82, is a professor and chair of the department of civil, architectural and environmental engineering. She is the first female dean at the school and was also its first female department chair. Read the news release

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