Haluk Beyenal and Assefaw Gebremedhin have been named as Berry Family Distinguished Professors in Washington State University’s Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture.
Beyenal is associate dean of research and graduate studies in the college and a professor in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering. Gebremedhin is an associate professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
With WSU since 2006, Beyenal conducts research in the fields of biofilms, electrochemistry, and environmental microbiology, where he has a research h-index of 66. He has been recognized with several honors, including an NSF Career Award, the Anjan Bose Outstanding Research Faculty Award, and the Tech Connect Defense Medical Innovation Award. He holds a bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD in chemical engineering from Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey.
With WSU since 2014, Gebremedhin is director of the Scalable Algorithms for Data Science (SCADS) Lab as well as the Department of Defense-funded VICEROY Northwest Institute for Cybersecurity Education and Research (CySER), program at WSU. His research interests include data science and artificial intelligence, network science, high-performance computing, and applications in cyber security, energy systems, and bioinformatics. He is recipient of the prestigious George Pólya Prize in Applied Combinatorics as well as a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for work on fast and scalable combinatorial algorithms for data analytics. He holds a MS and PhD in computer science from the University of Bergen, Norway and a bachelor’s degree from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.
Berry Family Distinguished Professorship
George (ME, ‘73) and Joan (History, ’72) Berry have provided longtime support for faculty excellence in the areas where they received their educations, specifically in the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture, liberal arts, and education. The professorship is in both George and Joan’s names but also in the name of George’s father, Harry W. Berry, a former professor of architecture at Washington State College. George Berry founded an architectural and engineering design firm and then became involved in real estate development. Through their gifts, the Berrys are working to assure that future students enjoy the same high-quality education and valuable learning experiences that shaped their own lives.
“Donors like the Berrys make a tremendous difference in our work at the university — they allow our world-class faculty to thrive and our students to learn from exceptional researchers and leaders,” said Partha Pande, dean of the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture. “We are so thankful for their continued generosity.”
