School Chairs
All eight of the school chairs are instrumental in the continued success of the College, ensuring all students graduate ready to make an impact on our world.
Mark Costello, Ph.D.
Mark Costello is the William R. T. Oakes Chair of the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering. He comes to this position after a distinguished career as a faculty member, most recently as the AE School's David S. Lewis Professor of Autonomy, with a joint appointment to the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Professor Costello most recently completed an assignment to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where he served as a Program Manager in the Tactical Technology Office. He is the director of Center for Advanced Machine Mobility (CAMM), a multidisciplinary research center consisting of a network of faculty and students focused on mobile platform technologies. Mark works in the area of dynamics, control, and design. He has earned national recognition for a substantial research program in the development of innovative flight mechanics and controls technologies for a variety of flight vehicles, including rotorcraft, projectiles, parafoils, and unmanned air vehicles. Findings from his research endeavors are summarized in more than 100 papers in archival journals, conference proceedings, and technical reports.
Magnus Egerstedt, Ph.D.
Magnus Egerstedt is the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds secondary appointments in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, the School of Interactive Computing, and the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, and has previously served as the Executive Director for the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech. He received the M.S. degree in Engineering Physics and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, the B.A. degree in Philosophy from Stockholm University, and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Harvard University. Dr. Egerstedt conducts research in the areas of control theory and robotics, with particular focus on control and coordination of complex networks, such as multi-robot systems, mobile sensor networks, and cyber-physical systems. Magnus Egerstedt is a Fellow of the IEEE and has received a number of teaching and research awards, including the Ragazzini Award from the American Automatic Control Council, the Outstanding Doctoral Advisor Award and the HKN Outstanding Teacher Award from Georgia Tech, the Alumni of the Year Award from the Royal Institute of Technology, and the CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Samuel Graham Jr., Ph.D.
Sam Graham earned his B.S. from Florida State University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech. He joined the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering in September 2003 after spending time at Sandia National Laboratories and Stanford University. Graham also holds a joint appointment with the Oak Ridge National Laboratories. Graham is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award; is an ASME Fellow; a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board; and a member of the Engineering Science Research Foundation Advisory Board for Sandia National Labs. He was recently named a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Nagoya University in Japan working with Nobel Prize Winner in Physics, Professor Hiroshi Amano.
Graham oversees a school that is consistently ranked as one of the nation's most prominent programs of its kind in both graduate and undergraduate education. The school is one of the largest producers of mechanical and nuclear engineers in the United States, with almost 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students and 115 faculty members.
Susan Margulies, Ph.D.
Susan Margulies, Ph.D., was named the Wallace H. Coulter Chair of the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Injury Biomechanics in May 2017 and began her appointment on August 1. Margulies earned her B.S.E in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University and Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. After a postdoctoral fellowship and faculty appointment at Mayo Medical School, she joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993. Her research focuses on traumatic brain injury in children and ventilator-induced lung injury. Margulies focuses on prevention, intervention and treatments. She is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society, and Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
H. Edwin Romeijn, Ph.D.
Edwin Romeijn oversees the nation’s largest industrial engineering program. He received his M.S. in econometrics and Ph.D. in operations research from Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He previously served as the program director for the Manufacturing Enterprise Systems, Service Enterprise Systems, and Operations Research program at the National Science Foundation, and as professor and Richard C. Wilson Faculty Scholar in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. He is a member of the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences, Mathematical Optimization Society, Society of Industrial an Applied Mathematics and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.
David Sholl, Ph.D.
David Sholl received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Colorado. Afterwards, he participated in postdoctoral research programs at the Pennsylvania State University and Yale University. In 2008, he joined the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering faculty at Georgia Tech. His awards include the University Medal from the Australian National University, the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award and the George Tallman Ladd Award for Excellence in Research from Carnegie Mellon University. His research group has published in the areas of computational materials modeling, porous materials for carbon capture applications, membranes for gas separations, and heterogeneous catalysis. Sholl has also served as the research and thesis advisor to more than 80 students at the bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral, and postdoctoral levels.
Naresh Thadhani, Ph.D.
Naresh Thadhani joined the faculty of the School of Materials Science and Engineering in 1992. He received his B.S. in Engineering from the University of Rajasthan in India, M.S. at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and his Ph.D. from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Thadhani is currently working on research projects that are sponsored by the Department of Defense and industries. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and American Society for Metals International. He is an author of more than 200 publications in journals and proceedings, as well as the editor of Spring Series on Shock Compression, associate editor of Shock Waves: An International Journal, and past president of the Alpha Sigma Mu, Materials Honors Society.
Donald Webster, Ph.D.
Don Webster earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. His primary research interests lie in environmental fluid mechanics, with an emphasis on the influence of fluid motion and turbulence on biological systems. His work has been featured in the New York Times and dozens of other news outlets. He is a fellow of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography and has served on the editorial board of the journal Experiments in Fluids for more than a decade.
Webster has won a number awards, including the Class of 1934 Outstanding Innovative Use of Education Technology Award, the Eichholz Faculty Teaching Award, and the British Petroleum Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award. He has been a member of Georgia Tech’s Commission on Creating the Next in Education, including chairing a discovery group and co-chairing an ideation group.
