College of Engineering Promotes Five Talented Faculty Members
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The UMass Amherst College of Engineering (CoE) is proud to announce the promotion of five of its valued faculty members. The CoE has elevated Senior Lecturer William Leonard to Senior Lecturer II, Lecturers Shira Epstein, Karen Skolfield, and Nick Tooker to the status of Senior Lecturer, and Research Assistant Professor Cole Fitzpatrick to Research Associate Professor.
In 2017 Epstein joined UMass Amherst as an Engineer in Residence in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) M5 Makerspace. In 2018 she was appointed the Director of Campus Makerspaces, with a secondary appointment as a Lecturer in the ECE department. Since 2018 she has served as a course coordinator for ECE 415/416: Senior Design Project. This required capstone course provides all ECE seniors with a year-long, hands-on, engineering- design and implementation experience. In 2019 she launched the interdisciplinary UMass All-Campus Makerspace, which is open to all students, faculty, and staff of UMass and the Five Colleges and provides training and access to equipment. She earned her M.S. in Computer Science from the UMass Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences in 2023 and received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2012.
Skolfield is a distinguished poet with many awards, publications, and readings. She taught writing and literature courses in the UMass Amherst English Department from 1994 through 1998 and that year earned her MFA in Writing from the university. From 1998 to 2005, Skolfield served as the CoE Director of Communications. In addition, she taught writing courses for the UMass Department of Journalism from 2002 to 2012. Since 2012 Skolfield has taught junior-year writing courses in the CoE as a Lecturer. Her sections focus on the fundamentals of writing, including sentence clarity, using and citing sources, and forming creative sentence structure. In addition to her classroom teaching, Skolfield has served as a Writer in Residence for the CoE since 2015. She earned her B.A. in English from West Chester University in Pennsylvania.
In 2018 Tooker joined the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department as a Lecturer and since then has taught 10 different courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels. He was recently selected as one of eight UMass Amherst Lilly Teaching Fellows for the 2024-2025 academic year. Among other honors, he has won the New England Water Environment Association Clair N. Sawyer Award and the Water Environment Federation Furhman Medal for Outstanding Water Quality Academic-Practice Collaboration. He earned his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Northeastern University in Boston, his M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Davis, and his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Montana State University in Bozeman.
Leonard is perhaps the most decorated teacher in the CoE in terms of teaching awards. He received the UMass Amherst Distinguished Teaching Award in both the graduate-student category (1995) and faculty category (2015), as well as the College of Engineering Outstanding Teaching Award in 2009. Leonard also won the Outstanding ECE Faculty Award from the UMass Amherst student chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. After serving in the UMass Amherst Physics Department as a Research Assistant Professor from 1995 to 2002 and Research Associate Professor from 2002 to 2009, he spent one year as an Associate Professor in the Physics Department at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. From 2010 to 2014, he was a Lecturer in the UMass ECE Department and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2014. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from UMass Amherst in 1988.
Fitzpatrick joined the CEE Department and the UMass Transportation Center in 2017 as a Research Assistant Professor. His research focuses on motor-vehicle crash data, leveraging advanced data-analysis techniques to improve transportation-safety outcomes. In addition to his research, Fitzpatrick has been actively involved in outreach initiatives. He collaborates with World is Our Classroom, a program that introduces high-school students in the Springfield area to career paths in transportation. His efforts aim to inspire and educate the next generation of engineers by providing them with real-world insights into the transportation industry. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering (with a Transportation Emphasis) from UMass Amherst and his B.S. in Civil Engineering from Oregon State University. He has received numerous accolades, including the Dwight D. Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship and the New England ITE Emerging Professional Award.