Finalists for WSU Engineering and Architecture Dean Post Slated to Visit Campus

PULLMAN, Wash. – Three final candidates have been selected for further interviews and to meet with faculty and staff as part of the search for a new dean of the College of Engineering and Architecture at Washington State University.

The three candidates are scheduled to separately visit the Pullman campus for two days between April 27 and May 3. Under a schedule that will be announced later this month, the candidates will be made available for open-session meetings with WSU faculty, students and staff.

The three finalists are Peter Nelson, professor and head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Chen-Ching Liu, associate dean for organizational infrastructure at the College of Engineering, University of Washington; and Seshu Desu, distinguished professor and head, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The search effort for the new dean of the College of Engineering and Architecture is chaired by Mike Griswold, dean of the WSU College of Sciences. The process was prompted by the announcement last fall that the incumbent dean, Anjan Bose, planned to step down from the post next August in order to make research and teaching his primary focus.

Nelson, who is scheduled to visit the campus April 25-26, received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science from North Park College and master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science from Northwestern University.

Prior to becoming the computer science department head at UIC in 2001, Nelson founded and served as director of UIC’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which specializes in applied AI research and development. In that capacity, he undertook a variety of applied intelligent systems projects in the areas of intelligent transportation systems, bioinformatics, manufacturing optimization and networking. 

Nelson has been the recipient of more than 45 grants and contracts totaling more than $9 million from a variety of government agencies and corporations.  He has published more than 60 scientific articles and presented his research results at technical conferences in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia and has served as a technical consultant for numerous corporations.

Scheduled to visit WSU April 27-28, Liu received bachelor’s and master’s degrees degrees from National Taiwan University before earning a doctoral degree in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1983, he joined the UW faculty, where he also serves as director of the Advanced Power Technologies Center.

Liu has been active in power system research and education. His areas of interest include power infrastructure defense systems, intelligent system applications and power system economics.  He has published extensively in major technical journals and conferences and currently chairs the Technical Committee on Power System Analysis, Computing and Economics of the IEEE Power Engineering Society.

In 1985, Liu was elected “Teacher of the Year in EE” and received a Presidential Young Investigator Award the following year. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and received a Third Millennium Medal and the Power Engineering Society Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award from the institute in 2000 and 2004, respectively.

Scheduled to visit campus May 2-3, Desu earned bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, physics and chemistry and a master’s degree in inorganic chemistry from Andhra University in India. He also earned a master’s degree in materials science from the Indian Institute of Technology, and a doctoral degree in materials science and engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 

He worked in industry for seven years, joining Bell Laboratories and working with semiconductor technology, before moving to General Electric, where he served in the optical technology division. Later, he served for ten years as a faculty member at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University before joining the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1999.

His research interests include electronic materials for advanced semiconductor devices, novel processes for submicron devices and structure-property relations in thin films. Desu was the principle editor of the Journal of Materials Research for three years and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Electroceramics. He is an active senior member and Fellow of the American Ceramics Society, and his research has been funded by the Department of Defense, Office of Naval Research and private industries such as Sharp Microelectronics in Japan and Samsung in Korea.