{"id":163194,"date":"2025-06-24T09:00:54","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T13:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/?p=163194"},"modified":"2025-06-24T10:30:01","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T14:30:01","slug":"eng-faculty-promoted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/2025\/06\/24\/eng-faculty-promoted\/","title":{"rendered":"Promotions for ENG Faculty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cited as leaders in their fields and in the classroom<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Six full professors, two associate professors with tenure<\/strong><\/strong><\/h4>\n

By BU Today<\/a> staff<\/em><\/p>\n

Among the nearly two dozen faculty on Boston University\u2019s Charles River Campus recently promoted to full professor are six from the BU College of Engineering. With this milestone promotion, BU Provost Gloria Waters recognizes the faculty as excellent teachers and researchers who are advancing their fields.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the world and institutions like BU navigate daily change that impacts our communities and missions, [these faculty] are rising to the challenge by pursuing new areas of inquiry, employing innovative approaches, and helping launch entirely new fields of study through exciting collaborations with colleagues across departments, schools, and campuses,\u201d BU provost Gloria Waters wrote in an email to BU faculty and staff announcing the promotions. \u201cIn doing so, they exemplify each day the depth and excellence of Boston University\u2019s talented academic community.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition, two ENG faculty have been promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure.<\/p>\n

“Each in their unique way demonstrates daily the caliber of education and accomplishment possible through innovation, creativity, leadership, and commitment to student success,” wrote Waters. “We see great things ahead for them and are pleased they have chosen BU as the institution at which to advance their careers.”<\/span><\/p>\n

The ENG faculty promoted to the rank of full professor in 2025 are:<\/p>\n

James Bird<\/strong><\/a>, College of Engineering professor of mechanical engineering<\/strong>, researches the physics of droplets and bubbles, with applications spanning forensic science, biofouling prevention, aerosol formation, and disease transmission. His work explores how bubbles burst, how droplets spread, and how fluids interact with surfaces, producing insights that impact environmental sustainability, industrial processes, and biomedical engineering. He has published in top scientific journals, including Nature<\/em>, Science<\/em>, Physical Review Letters<\/em>, and Nature Communications<\/em>, and has been featured in popular outlets like Physics Today<\/em>, Chemical & Engineering News<\/em>, and PBS\u2019 NOVA<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Mary Dunlop<\/strong><\/a>, ENG professor of biomedical engineering<\/strong>, specializes in synthetic biology, microbial systems, feedback control, single-cell methods, antibiotic resistance, metabolic engineering, deep learning, and optogenetics. Her research is supported by major grants from the NIH and NSF, and she serves as her department\u2019s vice chair. A past NSF CAREER award winner, she is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and has garnered numerous honors for her lab and classroom work, including BU\u2019s Award for Excellence in Mentoring Postdocs, the College of Engineering\u2019s Faculty Service and Teaching Excellence awards, the NSF Transitions Award, and a US Department of Energy Early Career Award. She has published 75 articles in top-tier biomedical journals.<\/p>\n

Douglas Holmes<\/strong><\/a>, ENG professor of mechanical engineering<\/strong>, explores how structures bend, wrinkle, and snap under various forces. His work focuses on slender structures and soft materials\u2014from airplane wings to human hair to robotic grippers inspired by origami\u2014leading to the development of new materials and devices with applications in robotics, aerospace, and biomedical engineering. He has published extensively in journals such as Science Robotics<\/em>, Advanced Functional<\/em> Materials<\/em>, and Matter<\/em>, with lead articles in Physical Review Letters<\/em> and Soft Matter<\/em> on self-ordering of buckling beams and elastogranular mechanics.<\/p>\n

Alex Olshevsky<\/strong><\/a>, ENG professor of electrical and computer engineering<\/strong>, researches reinforcement learning, multi-agent control, and distributed optimization. His work seeks to enhance our understanding of how classical gradient methods can be adapted for reinforcement learning and has enabled the creation of faster, more reliable algorithms. He is a past NSF CAREER award winner and has received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, the INFORMS Prize for best paper at the intersection of operations research and computer science, and an International Medical Informatics Association Award for best clinical informatics paper. He has published dozens of articles and papers in leading engineering journals and conference proceedings, including SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization<\/em> and Algorithmica<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Darren Roblyer<\/strong><\/a>, ENG professor of biomedical engineering<\/strong>, researches and develops new label-free imaging modalities to diagnose disease and monitor therapies. A main thrust of his lab is development of new wearable and handheld technologies that can provide earlier assessments of therapy effectiveness for cancer, cardiovascular diseases, kidney disease, and other disorders. He is supported by numerous grants from the NIH and NSF and serves as graduate chair for the biomedical engineering department. A senior member of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, he is the founding editor in chief of SPIE Biophotonics Discovery<\/em>, a US Department of Defense Era of Hope Scholar, and an American Cancer Society Research Scholar. He has published 165 articles in top-tier biomedical journals.<\/p>\n

Wilson Wong<\/strong><\/a>, ENG professor of biomedical engineering<\/strong>, researches smart medicines and diagnostics with synthetic biology, developing ways to control mammalian cell functions through engineering, biological network design, molecular biology, and chemical biology for medical applications, such as CAR T-cell therapy. A past NSF CAREER award winner, he is supported by numerous grants from the NSF and NIH and has received an Allen Distinguished Investigator Award, an American Chemical Society Synthetic Biology Young Investigator Award, and an NIH Director\u2019s New Innovator Award. He has published 113 articles in top-tier biomedical journals.<\/p>\n

The ENG faculty promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure are:<\/p>\n

Sheila Russo<\/a>, ENG associate professor of mechanical engineering,<\/strong> is an expert in soft robotics, especially for surgical and other medical applications. Her Materials Robotics Laboratory produces robotic solutions to improve existing medical procedures and enable new therapeutic capabilities in minimally invasive surgery. For example, she and her team developed a soft-robotic bronchoscope that will enable pulmonologists to more easily and safely examine the lung and extract a biopsy, ultimately helping to catch lung cancer at its earliest stage, when the disease is most treatable. In 2020, Russo received the NIH Trailblazer Award for New and Early Stage Investigators. In addition to founding and directing the Materials Robotics Laboratory, she co-founded and co-directs the Soft Materials Processing Core Lab at BU.<\/p>\n

Rabia Yazicigil<\/a><\/strong>, ENG associate professor of electrical and computer engineering,<\/strong> leads the Wireless Integrated Systems and Extreme Circuits (WISE-Circuits) Laboratory, developing energy efficient integrated circuits for applications such as bioelectronics and biomanufacturing. She led the design of a miniaturized ultra-low-power chip for an ingestible gut health monitor that might lead to more effective management of inflammatory bowel diseases. Along with colleagues across industry and academia, Yazicigil was recently awarded a $6 million grant from the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition Hub to develop advanced universal data decoding chips, with applications in wireless communications. Past honors for Yazicigil include the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the BU ENG Early Career Excellence in Research Award.<\/p>\n

For the story on all BU faculty promoted to full professor in 2025, visit <\/em>BU Today<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“They exemplify each day the depth and excellence of Boston University\u2019s talented academic community.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2662,"featured_media":156875,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[236,257,1163,899,1075,1193,907,1088,1060,909,908,1048,1036,1080],"tags":[1347,1076,284,395,894,636,246,633],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163194"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163194"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":164316,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163194\/revisions\/164316"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}