UMass Board of Trustees Awards Tenure and Promotion to Six CoE Faculty Members

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On June 11, 2025, the University of Massachusetts Board of Trustees awarded tenure to the following College of Engineering (CoE) faculty members: Lauren Andrews, Chemical Engineering (ChE); Konstantinos Andreadis, Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE); Peter Beltramo, ChE; Tingyi “Leo” Liu, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE); Beatriz Lorenzo, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE); and Govind Srimathveeravalli, MIE. The Board of Trustees also promoted each of these CoE faculty to associate professor.  

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Andrews is the Marvin and Eva Schlanger Faculty Fellow in Chemical Engineering and a faculty affiliate in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Graduate Program, Biotechnology Training Program, and the Institute for Applied Life Sciences. Her research group is developing programmable microbes and microbial communities to advance technologies for biomanufacturing, medicine, bioremediation, and agriculture. As she says, “To precisely control how a cell senses, remembers, and responds to its environment, we engineer synthetic gene networks and study their dynamics with high-throughput experimental and modeling approaches.” She has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Whiting Fellowship, the Jeffrey M. Davis Teaching Award, and the College of Engineering Outstanding Teaching Award. 

Andrews earned her B.S. from Cornell University and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder, all in Chemical Engineering. She also did a postdoc jointly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Biological Engineering and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

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The research conducted by Andreadis has primarily focused on the intersection between applied hydrologic modeling and remote sensing, data science, as well as the study of large-scale hydrology as it relates to climate change and environmental monitoring. In 2015 Andreadis was the recipient of the NASA Early Career Achievement Medal for his work in developing a framework for assimilating satellite and other datasets into land-surface models.

Andreadis received his B.S. degree from the Department of Environmental Engineering at the Technical University of Crete in Greece and his M.Sc.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington. After a two-year postdoc at the Byrd Polar Research Center at The Ohio State University, and before coming to UMass Amherst, he served at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a research scientist.

Beltramo researches interfacial soft matter and colloid science in contexts ranging from membrane biophysics and biomimetic materials to particle-stabilized emulsions and ordered 2D materials. As he says, “Research in our group focuses on applying fundamental engineering principles and novel techniques to understand and engineer interfacial processes pertinent to drug delivery, sustainability, and advanced functional materials.” His recent recognitions include the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, the American Chemical Society’s Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Award, a CoE Barbara H. and Joseph I. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, and a Lilly Teaching Fellowship from UMass Amherst. 

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Beltramo earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Delaware. Before starting at UMass Amherst in 2018, he completed a postdoc at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. 

Liu’s research centers on the science and engineering of interdisciplinary interfaces at the micro- and nano-scale, with broad applications spanning liquid-metal-enabled soft and stretchable electronics, wearable and implantable medical devices, bio-inspired micro/nano soft robotics, advanced heterogeneous integration, and super-repellent surfaces. In 2023, Liu received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Trailblazer R21 Award to develop next-generation brain-computer interfaces using soft and stretchable neural probes. These probes are engineered to be stiff during implantation and soft during operation, significantly reducing immune responses. Liu hopes this technology will open new avenues for investigating neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. 

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Liu earned his B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University in China and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), before doing a postdoc at the UCLA California NanoSystems Institute.

Lorenzo conducts research in networking and mobile computing, B5G/6G wireless networks, resilient and intelligent networks, and quantum networking. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Florida, and a senior researcher at the Centre for Wireless Communications at the University of Oulu in Finland as well as the Atlantic Research Center for Information and Communication Technologies at the University of Vigo in Spain. She has published more than 80 journal and conference papers in prestigious journals of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Association for Computing Machinery. Her research has been funded by the NSF, the Department of Defense (DoD), and others. Lorenzo has served as an associate editor for both IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.  

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Lorenzo received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Oulu and M.Sc. degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Vigo.

Srimathveeravalli investigates the interaction of non-ionizing energy and biology at multiscale resolution, from cells through organ systems. His research team uses computer simulations to model biological responses evoked upon exposure to energy and to design energy parameters that elicit specific responses. As he says, “We develop novel medical devices for energy delivery in vitro and in vivo, allowing identification of signaling pathways and cellular activity that is altered or upregulated upon energy-based treatment. The knowledge gained from our experiments has applications in tumor ablation, drug delivery, immunotherapy, and tissue engineering.” His lab is supported by the NIH, DoD Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs Awards, the NSF Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport CAREER Award, and various entities at UMass Amherst. 

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Srimathveeravalli earned his B.E. from the University of Madras in Chennai, India, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. (July 2025)