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.

Douglas Blough, Ph.D.

Interim Steve W. Chaddick Chair, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Douglas Blough, professor and associate chair for faculty development, is the interim chair for the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Blough’s research currently focuses on wireless networks and, in the past, also covered dependable/secure computing. He has more than 160 archival publications in these areas and has led 37 federally-funded or industry-sponsored research projects, with a total funding level of more than $8 million. His current research is funded by two National Science Foundation grants in the area of next-generation wireless networks that explore the design challenges for networks operating in the millimeter-wave bands. In addition to his academic roles, he previously held fellowship positions with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Blough attended the Johns Hopkins University where he received the B.S.E.E. degree and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science in 1984, 1986, and 1988, respectively.

Mark Costello, Ph.D.

Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering Chair

William R. T. Oakes Professor and Chair

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.

Samuel Graham Jr., Ph.D.

Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. School Chair, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

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.

Christopher Jones, Ph.D.

John F. Brock, III School Chair, School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering

Christopher W. Jones is the John F. Brock III School Chair in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE). Jones has been a faculty member at Georgia Tech since 2000, leading a ChBE research group that works in catalysis and adsorption, with a strong emphasis in materials chemistry. He is known in the field for his pioneering work on materials that extract carbon dioxide from ultra-dilute mixtures such as ambient air, which are key components of direct air capture technologies that have the potential to reverse climate change.

Jones was Georgia Tech's associate vice president for research from 2013-2019. This included a period as interim executive vice president in 2018. In addition to his roles at Georgia Tech, Jones served on a committee commissioned by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine to create a national research agenda to address climate change and carbon dioxide removal. The group of experts from across North America developed a consensus study — Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration — from 2017-2018. He received his undergradute chemical engineering degree at Michigan, then earned his master's and Ph.D. degrees at California Institute of Technology.

Machelle Pardue, Ph.D.

Interim Wallace H. Coulter Chair, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech

Professor Machelle Pardue is the interim chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. She serves as the Department’s associate chair for faculty development and has been a member of the Coulter BME faculty since 2015, when she moved her academic appointment from the Emory University Department of Ophthalmology. Pardue’s research focuses on developing life-changing treatments for people with vision loss, particularly those with retinal degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and myopia. Her work has been supported by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Institutes of Health and private industry.

For more than 20 years, Pardue has been a leading teacher and researcher in Atlanta. In addition to her positions at Emory and Georgia Tech, Pardue is a research career scientist at the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Healthcare System and executive associate director of the Atlanta VA Center for Visual and Neurocognitive Rehabilitation. She erned her doctorate in vision science and biology at the University of Waterloo and completed her postdoctoral training in visual electrophysiology at Loyola School of Medicine and the Hines VA Hospital in Chicago. Her bachelor’s degree is in zoology from the University of Wyoming.

H. Edwin Romeijn, Ph.D.

H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair, Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering

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 Fellow of the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and the Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers (IISE), and a member of the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS), Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).

Naresh Thadhani, Ph.D.

School of Materials Science and Engineering Chair

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.

Karen and John Huff School Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering

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.