Christofa and Zink Named Chancellor’s Leadership Fellows

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Eleni Christofa and Michael Zink

The Office of Faculty Development has announced the 2024-25 Chancellor's Leadership Fellows, and two of the six Fellows are faculty from the College of Engineering: Eleni Christofa, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Michael Zink, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

The Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowship (CLF) program seeks to cultivate future campus leaders by offering a half-time, one-year temporary appointment to an administrative area on campus and providing mentoring from the leader of the host unit. In addition, fellows are expected to launch a significant program during their fellowship year.

Eleni Christofa will work on exploring opportunities for experiential learning and industry engagement for undergraduate and graduate students in engineering. This work will focus particularly on an expanded use of the Mount Ida Campus to support cooperative education and internship experiences. Christofa will be working with Michelle Budig, Senior Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs, and Sanjay Raman, Dean of the College of Engineering. 

Christofa’s research focuses on sustainable and resilient transportation systems that provide equitable access and safe operations to all users regardless of the transportation mode they use. Her recent work focuses on identifying transportation access inequities through community engaged research, developing traffic signal control strategies that minimize emissions, assessing the effectiveness of bicycle infrastructure treatments in improving safety for all users, and developing design guidelines for accessible bus stops. 

“I am excited about working with campus leadership to enhance the educational experiences for our students by facilitating new initiatives at the Mount Ida Campus that leverage opportunities in the Greater Boston area. I hope that my work through this fellowship contributes to our University’s mission by engaging engineers in community and industrial partnerships, enabling them to innovate to solve society’s most pressing problems.”  

Michael Zink will collaborate with Chris Misra, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and CIO, and Tom Bernardin, Director of Research Computing and Data and Executive Director of the Center for Data Science, to shape and execute UMass Amherst’s strategic objectives in cyberinfrastructure. Achieving this goal requires engaging with faculty members and key committees, including the Faculty Senate’s Research Council, Research Computing Committee, and Information and Communication Technology Council (ICTC). 

For the past 20 years, Zink’s research has focused on multimedia systems, cyber infrastructure, and large-scale sensor networks. He co-leads the Paros Center for Atmospheric Research and served as co-director for the graduated NSF Engineering Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere. 

"The primary objective of my Chancellor’s Leadership Fellowship is to create and maintain high-quality cyberinfrastructure on our campus, benefiting both faculty and students while attracting world-class scholars. Nearly every researcher at UMass Amherst relies on some form of cyberinfrastructure to advance their scientific discoveries. For instance, social scientists leverage HPC clusters for data analysis, researchers in the Stockbridge School of Agriculture employ wireless sensors and drones for smart farming, and faculty in Chemistry pioneer computational methods to explore biomolecules and biomaterials. These instances merely scratch the surface of the diverse applications of cyberinfrastructure across our campus.” 

"The Chancellor's Leadership Fellows program is an important opportunity for both the campus and our faculty," said Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Fouad Abd-El-Khalick. "I look forward to collaborating with each of them as they work on projects to expand their leadership development in ways that benefit our entire university."

The CLF nomination and application process commences annually in December. Full-time tenured faculty, senior lecturers, and librarians on continuing appointments are eligible for the fellowship which is administered by the Office of Faculty Development. A list of past Chancellor's Leadership Fellows by year can be found here.