Five new faculty members in four departments have joined the School of Engineering.
New assistant professors in mechanical engineering are Timothy S. Fisher and Kenneth D. Frampton.
A Semiconductor Research Corporation Graduate Fellow, Fisher received both his undergraduate and doctorate degrees from Cornell University, where he also served as an instructor in Introductory Thermodynamics. His research interests include emerging areas of experimental and computational thermo-fluid sciences. From 1991 to 1993, he worked for Motorola as an engineer in the automotive and industrial electronics group. He holds three U.S. patents.
Frampton hails from Duke University, where he received his doctorate and served as a research assistant professor and taught a third-year mechanical engineering course. His research objectives include developing an externally funded program in the field of adaptive structures and active sound and vibration control, specifically applied to fluid loaded/aeroelastic structures. Both undergraduate and master's degrees were earned at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. During the early 1990s, he worked as an acoustical engineer for Wyle Laboratories in Arlington, Virginia.
Bridget R. Rogers and G. Kane Jennings are the two new assistant professors in chemical engineering.
Rogers's master's and doctoral degrees were earned at Arizona State University, where she was an adjunct faculty member, and her undergraduate degree is from the University of Colorado.
Throughout her graduate education career, she has maintained full-time engineering responsibilities at Motorola. Her most recent position was that of technical staff scientist in the Semiconductor Technologies Materials Characterization Lab. Over the last four years, she has participated in project teams involved in both the development of CVD aluminum and the development of copper diffusion barriers for use in ULSI multilevel metallization stacks. She plans to continue research in processes and materials involved in building the multilevel metallization stacks of integrated circuits.
Jennings comes from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his doctoral degree in chemical engineering, served as a teaching assistant, and supervised two undergraduate students on research projects involving the syntheses of long-chain thiol adsorbates and characterization of the resulting films formed on copper and gold. His undergraduate degree was earned at Auburn University. He has held internships at Dow-Corning, Dow Chemical, Merck and Co., Inc., and Inland Rome, Inc. In 1997 he was a DOE-Electrochemical Society Summer Fellow.
Anita Mahadevan-Jansen, previously a post-doctoral research associate at Vanderbilt, is now an assistant professor in the biomedical engineering department. She specializes in biomedical optics with an emphasis on spectroscopy and is initiating a program of research and teaching in biomedical optics. She is conducting research on the use of infra-red and Raman spectra in the diagnosis of ovarian cancer and the treatment of lung tumors. She received her master's and doctoral degrees in biomedical engineering from the University of Texas, Austin, and her bachelor's degree from the University of Bombay, in Bombay, India.

Old Faces, New Chairs Associate Dean Edward J. White has been named interim chair of the Computer Science Department; Professor Arthur J. Brodersen now heads the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department; and Professor Robert Pitz is the new chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department.

Daniel M. Gaines, a new member of the computer science faculty, received both his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his bachelor's degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. A research fellow at Illinois, he also served as a teaching assistant and was ranked an Outstanding Teaching Assistant (top 10 percent campuswide) by students in 1997. His research interests are in the study of human problem solving in complex domains, with particular interest in planning and design problems. He previously worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he assisted in creating a national online parts repository for design, assembly, and process planning, and developed a prototype tool for distributed CAD/CAM applications.

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