The School of Engineering has announced the appointments of a new department chair and three new faculty members.
George M. Hornberger, Craig E. Philip Professor of Engineering, has been named chair of the department of civil and environmental engineering. He succeeds David S. Kosson who served 12 years as chair of the department.
Rizia Bardhan, Ravindra Duddu and Cary Pint join the engineering faculty as assistant professors.
Hornberger, an international leader in hydrology and environmental engineering and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, joined the department of civil and environmental engineering as a Distinguished University Professor in 2008. He is the director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment. He previously was a professor at the University of Virginia for many years where he held the Ernest H. Ern Chair of Environmental Sciences.
Kosson, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering, will continue his research and teaching as well as lead a new school-wide initiative that addresses engineering and scientific issues in the area of energy and natural resources.
Rizia Bardhan, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, focuses her research on interdisciplinary nanoscience, with the convergence of multiple disciplines: engineering, material science, chemistry, physics and biomedicine. She completed her Ph.D. in chemistry at Rice University in 2010 and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, Calif., from 2010 to 2012.
Ravindra Duddu, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, works on large-scale simulation and parallel computing as well as computational mechanics, and fracture and damage mechanics. He earned a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from Northwestern University in 2009. He served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin from 2009-2010, and a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University from 2010 to 2012.
Cary Pint, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, conducts research at the intersection of integrated energy devices and fields such as robotics, aerospace systems, building materials and smart buildings as well as biomaterials and devices. He earned a Ph.D. in applied physics from Rice University in 2010. He served as a postdoctoral fellow in the electrical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010-2011, and a research scientist in the Extreme Technology Research Group at Intel Labs in Santa Clara, Calif. from 2011 to 2012.