First Faculty Appointed to New Biomedical Engineering Department

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The first faculty hires for the new department of biomedical engineering in the College of Engineering have been appointed with tenure following approval by the Board of Trustees at its June 20 meeting.

Professor Tammy L. Haut Donahue, the founding department head, will lead the emerging program, which will offer undergraduate and graduate degrees. The department is expected to grow to 12 tenure-track faculty and one lecturer by fall 2022.

Haut Donahue’s research work is in the area of analytical and experimental biomechanics with a focus on the musculoskeletal system. She comes to Amherst from Colorado State University, where she was a professor and associate department head for undergraduate studies in the department of mechanical engineering. Haut Donahue was also a core faculty member in CSU’s School of Biomedical Engineering.

As a principal investigator, Haut Donahue has been awarded about $14 million in research funding including $1.4 million in current support. The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are among the sources of her external funding.

From 2001-11, she was on the mechanical engineering and engineering mechanics faculty at Michigan Technological University with an adjunct appointment in biomedical engineering. In 2007-08, she was a visiting academic at in Dublin, Ireland.

She completed her B.S. in mechanical engineering at Michigan State University in 1995. Two years later, Haut Donahue earned an M.S. in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Davis, where she was awarded a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering in 2000. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the department of orthopaedics at Pennsylvania State University in 2000-01.

Also joining the department is professor Seth W. Donahue, whose research focuses on evolutionary biomechanics, tissue regeneration and physiology. He taught previously at Colorado State University (2011-18) and Michigan Technological University (2006-11). In 2007-08, he was an honorary research fellow at the Royal College of Surgeons and a visiting academic at Trinity College, both in Dublin, Ireland. 

He has published 47 journal articles, two book chapters and 59 conference papers and posters. As principal investigator and co-investigator, he has attracted $3.1 million in funding to his prior institutions.

Donahue earned his B.S in mechanical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1992. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at the University of California, Davis, in 1997 and 1999, respectively. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the department of orthopaedics and rehabilitation at Penn State in 2001.