Congratulations to Calin Belta, Inaugural Holder of the Tegan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellowship
”The Tegan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellow honors a mid-career (Associate to early Full Professor) faculty for extraordinary performance and impact in research, teaching and service to the College and profession. The Distinguished Faculty Fellow is an honor awarded to tenured faculty who are on a clear trajectory to extraordinary leadership careers in all dimensions of engineering science and education.”
Dr. Belta was recommended by a selection committee from a slate of extraordinary nominees. Calin came in as a Manufacturing Engineering Assistant Professor and has since been recently promoted to Full Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Systems Engineering.
Belta is the director of the Hybrid and Networked Systems (HyNeSs) Lab and has affiliate appointments in ECE and SE. His research interests include dynamics and control, formal verification, robotics, and systems biology. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and for the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization (SICON). He received the AFOSR Young Investigator Award in 2008 and the NSF CAREER Award in 2005 and recently landed a $4.5 million Cyber-Physical Systems Program (CPS) Frontier grant along with Doug Densmore. The researchers aim to engineer bacterial or mammalian cells to exhibit specified behaviors, and direct a fleet of micro-robots to corral the engineered cells into working together to perform desired tasks. Dr. Belta’s papers have been cited over 4000 times and he has an h-index of 36. Calin has also played a key role in transforming the way the College teaches the required Linear Algebra course to all our freshmen students. Calin will hold this title for five years and then we will select the next holder and so on every five years thereafter.