Ed Scheinerman named WSE vice dean for faculty

Ed Scheinerman has been named the school's vice dean for faculty, effective Sept. 1. He brings to this position a breadth of experience in areas including student and academic affairs and faculty hiring and promotion, as well as in building and maintaining critical collaborations with the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and other university divisions.

A faculty member since 1984, Scheinerman has been integral in helping define and carry out the school's long-term strategic priorities in research, education, and translation. While serving as vice dean for graduate education, he led the integration of the Engineering for Professionals programs with the full-time residential programs and launched the DEng degree program.

Throughout this time, Scheinerman has remained active in his field, serving as principal investigator in the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence; authoring several textbooks, including The Mathematics Lover's Companion, which was written for a general audience and is being translated into five languages; and being named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

More from the Whiting School

Gregory Chirikjian, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has received the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' 2019 Machine Design Award. Established in 1958 by ASME's Design Engineering Division (then called the Machine Design Division), this award recognizes eminent achievement or distinguished service in the field of machine design, including application, research, development, or teaching. Chirikjian was recognized for introducing paradigms in the design of hyperredundant and binary-actuated mechanisms, modular self-reconfigurable robots, and spherical motors; and for mentoring generations of students and junior faculty in the areas of mechanisms and robotics.

Michael D. Shields, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science to receive a five-year grant under the agency's Early Career Research Program. The award recognizes young scientists and engineers who have received their doctorates within the last 10 years. Shields' research is focused on uncertainty quantification for wide-ranging problems in computational mechanics and computational materials science, with the goal of understanding the effects of uncertainties and random variations on the performance of materials and structures. His project—"Low-Dimensional Manifold Learning for Uncertainty Quantification in Complex Multiscale Stochastic Systems"—leverages large-scale dimension hyperreduction methods to enable uncertainty quantification for complex multiscale systems. This is Shields' third young investigator award. He is also the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.