Provost Fouad Abd-El-Khalick has announced that Scott Auerbach, chemistry; Andrea Nahmod, mathematics and statistics; and David Schmidt, mechanical and industrial engineering, have been selected to receive the lifetime honorific of Provost Professor. The title, which recognizes exceptional achievement in research or creative activity, and in teaching, will be conferred at the Celebration of Faculty Excellence on Tuesday, April 22. 

“These dedicated and exceptional faculty members exemplify the excellence of our educators,” Abd-El-Khalick says. “It is truly an honor to recognize their work and achievements in academic excellence, innovation, and commitment to student success.” 

The 2025 Provost Professors were selected from a competitive group of nominations by the Provost Professor Selection Committee. The Provost Professor title is designated for tenure-system faculty who hold the rank of professor and do not hold a named or distinguished professorship.

More information and a list past recipients of the Provost Professor title can be found on the Office of Faculty Development website.
 

Scott Auerbach

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Auerbach is an internationally recognized scholar of “zeolites,” which are crystalline structures with broad potential use in the generation of clean energy and carbon dioxide capture. An author of two books and over 130 articles, he has raised over $6 million in external funding. The founder and director of the Mahoney Family funded UMass Integrated Concentration in STEM (iCons) Program, he has received the campus Distinguished Teaching Award and the UMass System Manning Award.

 

Andrea Nahmod

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Nahmod is a world-renowned scholar in non-linear partial differential equations. She twice received the Simons Professorship – a premiere honor in mathematics – and earned the Sargent-Faul Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Chern Professorship, and is an elected fellow of the American Mathematical Society. She has raised over $14 million in external sponsorship for her work and is also a highly successful advisor and mentor for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as junior colleagues. She has organized intensive study semesters at leading mathematical institutes such as such as UC-Berkeley's MSRI and Brown University’s ICERM, to bring UMass Amherst students, postdocs, and faculty to work with world-class scholars. Among many recognitions, she has been profiled as a Top 8 Principal Investigator by the NSF’s Office of Legislative and Public Affairs for Hispanic Scientists.

 

David Schmidt

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Schmidt is a world-recognized leader in his field of clean energy, studying a range of topics from offshore wind turbines to heat transfer in additive manufacturing. He is an elected fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineering (SAE), a recipient of the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award and has received the Editor’s Choice Award for an article published in Science. He has been awarded over $10 million in funding that supports many UMass researchers and Polymer Science Engineering's cold spray system facility. He has won multiple awards for his excellence in teaching and advising, including the Distinguished Teaching Award, the College Outstanding Teaching Award and the SAE Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award. He has chaired or served on scores of doctoral committees and is recognized by his peers as a successful mentor of women engineering graduate students.