Kwon, Fan, and Schiffman Promoted to Full Professors
Content
Provost John McCarthy, the chief academic officer for UMass Amherst, has approved the promotion of three faculty members from the College of Engineering to full professor with tenure. The three promotions go to Do-Hoon Kwon of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department and Wei Fan and Jessica Schiffman from the Chemical Engineering (ChE) Department.
Kwon is affiliated with the Antennas and Propagation Lab in the ECE department, and his research expertise is in wideband antennas, small antennas, frequency selective surfaces, metamaterials, as well as cloaking and transformation electromagnetics.
Before coming to UMass Amherst, Kwon served as a senior engineer at Samsung Electronics and Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology from 2000 to 2006 and did post-doctoral research at Penn State University from 2006 to 2008.
Kwon won the inaugural Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Antennas and Propagation Edward E. Altshuler Prize Paper Award in 2011 and served as the associate editor for the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters from 2013 to 2019. He is also a senior member of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society.
Kwon earned his B.S. from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and his M.S. and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University.
Fan, the Edward S. Price Faculty Fellow in Chemical Engineering, heads the Fan Porous Materials Research Group, which focuses on the rational synthesis of nanoporous materials for biorefinery and drug delivery. In this research, the Fan team tailors the pore structure and size, surface properties, and active sites of nanoporous materials based on the comprehensive understanding of their crystallization mechanism.
Based on the Web of Science, Fan has published more than 108 papers related to his research in peer-reviewed journals, including more than 5,500 citations. He also has six patents and patent applications and has given more than 48 conference presentations.
Among many other honors, Fan has won the College of Engineering Barbara H. and Joseph I. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award and also its Outstanding Teaching Award.
Fan earned his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo and his B.S. from the University of Science and Technology of China. Fan also did post-doctoral research at the University of Minnesota from 2007 to 2010 in hierarchical zeolites and zeolite nanocrystals.
Schiffman heads the Schiffman Lab, an interdisciplinary, hands-on laboratory in the ChE department. According to Schiffman, “The mission of our laboratory is to use green engineering to design next-generation materials that improve human health and the environment. Using chemistry inspired by nature, we invent and manufacture a broad range of polymer materials – from fouling-resistant biomedical devices to filters that produce clean water and air.
Among many other honors, Schiffman was named an Influential Researcher by Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, an Emerging Investigator by Biomaterials Science, and she won the prestigious American Chemical Society Applied Materials & Interfaces Young Investigator Award in 2019. She was recently appointed the inaugural deputy editor of the new peer-reviewed journal ACS Applied Engineering Materials.
In recognition of her dedication to mentoring and teaching, Schiffman was awarded the UMass campus-wide Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award and the UMass ADVANCE Faculty Mentor Award, as well as the College of Engineering’s Outstanding Teaching Award and the Barbara H. and Joseph I. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award.
Schiffman served as the interim department head of the ChE department during the 2021-2022 academic year and, prior to that, as the associate department head from 2020-2021.
Schiffman earned her B.S. from Rutgers University, her M.Eng. from Cornell University, and her Ph.D. from Drexel University, before doing post-doctoral research at Yale University. (July 2022)