Five candidates are finalists for the dean of the College of Engineering. Selected by a search committee, the candidates are visiting campus through March 9. Each candidate will participate in a public presentation on City Campus. Faculty, staff and students are encouraged to attend the presentations.

The candidates are James Alleman from Iowa State University; Jean-Pierre Bardet from University of Southern California; Mark Law from University of Florida; Alice Smith of Auburn University; and Timothy Wei of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. All public presentations are in Walter Scott Engineering Center, room 237.

Alleman’s presentation was Feb. 21. He joined Iowa State’s Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering as professor and chair in 2005. Prior academic appointments at Purdue University and the University of Maryland also included two service roles at Purdue, as both Assistant Chair in the School of Civil Engineering and as Associate Director of a NASA NSCORT advanced life support research center. All of his degrees were from the University of Notre Dame, in civil and environmental engineering.

Bardet’s public presentation is 3:30 p.m. Feb. 24. Professor and chair of the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Veterbi School of Engineering at USC (since 2006), Bardet is also director (since 2009) of the USC Center on Megacities. Originally educated in France, Bardet received his Master of Science and doctorate from the California Institute of Technology. His research interests are in civil infrastructure systems, geomechanics; geotechnical engineering; and earthquake engineering.

Smith’s public presentation is 3:30 p.m., Feb. 28. She is professor and chair of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Auburn after previously being on faculty at University of Pittsburgh. She has degrees in engineering and business from Rice University, Saint Louis University and Missouri University of Science and Technology. She also has industrial experience at Southwestern Bell Corp. Her research interests are in analysis, modeling and optimization of complex systems.

Wei’s public presentation is 3:30 p.m., March 3. He has been professor and head of the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer, in Troy, N.Y., since 2006, and was interim dean from June 2008 to August 2009. His research interests are in coupling fundamental fluid dynamics experiments with critical technologies of socio-technological importance. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Cornell, his master’s from Lehigh, both in mechanical engineering; and his doctorate in aerospace engineering from Michigan. He previously was on faculty at Rutgers, and has held numerous visiting faculty appointments.

Law’s public presentation is 3:30 p.m. March 7. Law is associate dean for academic affairs in the College of Engineering at Florida, and previously was professor and chair of the university’s electrical and computer engineering department. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Iowa State and a master’s of electrical engineering at Stanford, also earning his doctorate at Stanford University. He worked at Hewlett Packard for three years before joining faculty at Florida in 1988. His research interests include integrated circuit devices and reliability.