Four engineering faculty members are included in the 2025 11-member cohort of Chancellor Faculty Fellows. They are Ravindra Duddu, Justus Ndukaife, Ipek Oguz and Eric Tkaczyk.
Each fellow holds the title of Chancellor Faculty Fellow and receives $80,000 over a multi-year period to support their work. They also meet with their cohort to exchange ideas on teaching and research, build a broader intellectual community that advances collaborative scholarship, and engage in academic leadership development to increase their leadership capacity.
Ravindra Duddu is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, earth and environmental sciences, and mechanical engineering. His pioneering work on developing and extending nonlocal continuum damage mechanics to simulate hydrofracturing in glaciers and ice shelves addresses critical questions about the effects of atmospheric warming and climate change. He has served as the faculty head of Rothschild College since 2022.
Justus Ndukaife is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and assistant professor of mechanical engineering. His work on electrical engineering has been published in 21 journal papers as a corresponding author and has been cited nearly 450 times since he joined Vanderbilt in 2017. Ndukaife has garnered international recognition within the optical nanotweezers and nanophotonics research communities, as evidenced by the more than 20 invited presentations he has given at conferences and universities.
Ipek Oguz is an associate professor of computer science and of ophthalmology and visual sciences, and an assistant professor of biomedical, electrical and computer engineering. Her work bridges artificial intelligence research with its application in medical imaging, advancing the state of the art of medical image analysis. Oguz has been recognized at top-tier conferences with honors that include a Best Paper received at the 2023 Engineering & Urology Society Annual Meeting.
Eric Tkaczyk is an associate professor in dermatology and biomedical informatics and an assistant professor of biomedical, electrical and computer engineering. His innovative research combines state-of-the-art technology and AI to develop cutaneous biomarkers that guide diagnosis and therapy of severe systemic diseases, including cancer, infectious disease and autoimmune conditions. Leveraging his unique training and collaborations, Tkaczyk has creatively combined AI, imaging and other advanced technologies to make remarkable progress in GVHD diagnosis and combating diseases such as mpox and systemic sclerosis.
The Chancellor Faculty Fellows program was launched in September 2014 under the Trans-Institutional Programs initiative to support outstanding faculty who have recently received tenure.