Faculty promoted, department chairs named

Four faculty members in the George R. Brown School of Engineering have been promoted. The appointments are effective July 1.

Junichiro Kono, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been promoted to full professor. Kono came to Rice in 2000 after a fellowship at Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory at Stanford University.

Kono is the principal investigator on NanoJapan, an NSF-funded model program that connects engineering and physics undergraduates with the best of international research and the study of Japanese culture during study in Japan. The Rice endeavor was awarded the Institute of International Education’s (IIE) prestigious Andrew Heiskell Award for Innovation in International Education in 2008.

Rebekah Drezek, Stanley C. Moore Associate Professor in Bioengineering, has been promoted to full professor. Drezek joined the Rice faculty in 2002. She earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001.

Drezek was elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows, an honor bestowed to those in the top 2 percent of professionals in the field of medical and biological engineering. She was one of three U.S. scientists chosen by the Department of Defense for the Era of Hope Scholar Award in 2007, and is principal investigator on a $3 million breast cancer imaging effort with the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Mark Embree, associate professor of computational and applied mathematics, has been promoted to full professor. He joined the Rice faculty in 2002. Embree earned a doctorate in numerical analysis from Oxford University in 2000.

Embree heads the school of engineering’s curriculum committee. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2006 and won the Rice Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize for 2004, an honor granted by students to outstanding teachers. He is co-author of the book, Spectra and Pseudospectra: The Behavior of Nonnormal Matrices and Operators, published by Princeton University Press in 2005.

Janet Siefert, faculty fellow in the Department of Statistics, has been promoted to senior faculty fellow. She was awarded a doctorate in biology from the University of Houston in 1997 and joined Rice as a post-doctoral researcher. She is actively involved with the NASA Astrobiology Institute, founded in 1998 to study the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

In other personnel moves, Matthias Heinkenschloss is to become the new chair of the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics, also effective July 1. Heinkenschloss joined the Rice faculty in 1996.

Three other chairs were reappointed: Behnaam Aazhang, electrical and computer engineering; Kyriacos Zygourakis, chemical and biomolecular engineering; and Kathy Ensor, statistics.

Dwight Daniels, Engineering Communications