Three faculty members in the George R. Brown School of Engineering have been named to endowed chairs, effective July 1.
Junichiro Kono, professor of electrical and computer engineering, of materials science and nanoengineering, of physics and astronomy, and chair of applied physics, will become the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor in Engineering.
Daniel Kowel, assistant professor of statistics (STAT), will become the Dobelman Family Assistant Professor of STAT.
Jamie Padgett, professor of civil engineering, will become the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Engineering.
Padgett earned her Ph.D. in civil engineering from Georgia Tech in 2007 and joined the Rice faculty that year. Her research focuses on risk assessment of structures and infrastructure exposed to multiple hazards, such as hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. She serves on the leadership of national research centers that advance resilience modeling for infrastructure and their surrounding communities.
She was recently named a Fellow of the Structural Engineering Institute of the ASCE and was founding chair of its technical committee on Multiple Hazard Mitigation. Padgett has received a 2011 NSF CAREER Award and the 2017 ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize, and in 2019 named the Emergency Management Institute’s Objective Resilience Distinguished Lecturer.