Riccio College of Engineering Promotes Five Faculty to Full Professor
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UMass Amherst Provost Fouad Abd-El-Khalick has approved the promotion of five faculty members from the Riccio College of Engineering to full professor: Colin Gleason of the Civil and Environmental (CEE) Department; Chaitra Gopalappa of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department; Daniel Holcomb of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department; Ashish Kulkarni of the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) Department; and Jae-Hwang Lee of MIE.
Gleason is the CEE’s outgoing Armstrong Professional Development Professor and a renowned hydrologist who studies critical water-resource challenges on a global scale. As he says, “We care about rivers. We do field work, satellite remote sensing, machine learning, and modelling in order to improve our basic understanding of these most important water features. Our long-term goal is complete simultaneous knowledge of all rivers on Earth.” Gleason has been a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award recipient, a NASA New Investigator, the lead academic scientist for calibration/validation of U.S. inland hydrology for NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, the co-lead of the SWOT Discharge Algorithm Working Group, and a member of NASA’s SWOT and High Mountain Asia science teams. He is also the lead developer of the open-source Confluence software that NASA uses to make global river-data products from SWOT data. He earned his Ph.D. at UCLA and his M.S. and B.S. at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
Before her promotion, Gopalappa was an associate professor in the MIE department, and she also served as Honors Program Director for Commonwealth Honors College. Her pioneering studies target health equity and social justice, aiming to develop mathematical and computational models that capture interactions between multiple interrelated diseases, health behaviors, and social determinants of health. Her research goal is to inform disease prediction, prevention, and administrative policies and to understand the relation between diseases and social determinants such as poverty, food, and housing insecurity. Her research also develops analytic tools for evaluation of national and global public-health strategies for cancers, HIV, and sexually transmitted infections in collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and funderssuch as the National Institutes of Health and NSF. She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of South Florida and her B.E. from India’s Bangalore Institute of Technology.
Holcomb, who had been serving as an ECE associate professor before this promotion, won theprestigious 2018 NSF CAREER Award and the 2022-2023 College Outstanding Teaching Award. As he explains about his lab, “My research is on building secure embedded systems. We work broadly across computer-engineering topics such as formal verification, computer-aided design, and very-large-scale-integration (VLSI) design. Current projects involve securingFieldProgrammable Gate Arrays, Chiplets, Graphics Processing Units, and the Artificial Intelligence supply-chain.” He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley,his M.S. and B.S. from UMass Amherst, and he was a research fellow at the University of Michigan before joining UMass as a faculty member.
Kulkarni is the Edward S. Price Faculty Fellow and Graduate Program Director in the CBE department and an adjunct in BME and Chemistry. He is also Associate Director of the Center for Bioactive Delivery at IALS. He was elected as a senior member to the National Academy of Inventors and a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. As he says about his lab’s research, “Our group works at the interface of engineering and immunobiology to develop innovative ‘immunoengineering’ platforms and biologically inspired ‘immunotherapeutics’ that precisely modulate immune responses to treat diseases and improve human health.” His work has been published in high-visibility journals, including Nature Nanotechnology, Science Advances, Advanced Materials, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Communications, and PNAS. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati and his B.Tech. at the Institute of Chemical Technology in India and served as an instructor of medicine and associate bioengineer at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Lee was an MIE associate professor before his promotion to full professor. His research integrates extreme mechanics with nanoscale engineering, spanning advanced manufacturing, defense, energy, and nanotechnology. He received the 2016 UMass President's Science & Technology Initiative Award to lead an interdisciplinary project involving UMass Amherst, UMass Lowell, and the UMass Medical School. His laboratory has pioneered the Laser-Induced Projectile Impact Testing (LIPIT), a unique experimental platform that accelerates micrometer-scale projectiles to velocities approaching Mach 10 to probe the mechanical behavior of materials under high-strain rates and extreme temperatures. Using LIPIT, his group has advanced understanding of the dynamic responses of nanostructured materials and extended the technique to fluidic and biological systems. He received a Ph.D. from Iowa State University. For his postdoctoral study, he worked at the Ames Laboratory of the Department of Energy and the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT and then served as a research scientist at Rice University. (August 2026)