UW Board of Trustees Promotes Three SER Professors

Three University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources faculty members were promoted by the UW Board of Trustees at its recent May meeting.

“We’ve been able to recruit and support outstanding researchers who are internationally recognized for their expertise,” said Mark Northam, director of the School of Energy Resources (SER). “I’m pleased to see their efforts to expand UW’s energy programs rewarded.”

Trustees promoted:

-- Maohong Fan to professor in the College of Engineering and Applied Science Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering.

-- Po Chen to associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Geology and Geophysics.

-- Jay Sitaraman to associate professor in the College of Engineering and Applied Science Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Fan has led and worked on many projects in the areas of chemical production, clean energy production and environmental protection. These projects have been accomplished with funding from a wide range of domestic and international agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, the United Nations Development Programme and industrial companies such as Siemens and Caterpillar.

Chen’s expertise includes theoretical seismology and high-performance computing. His principal research interests involve earth imaging at a variety of scales. He has developed computationally intensive new imaging techniques, including full 3-D wavelength tomography, which is a method to create a 3-D model of the internal structures of a solid object.

Sitaraman is interested in development and application of parallel and scalable overset grid-based computational fluid dynamics methods to interesting physical problems with moving bodies and aeroelasticity. He was part of the HELIOS software development team that won the 2013 Schoers Award for Outstanding Rotorcraft Research.

The School of Energy Resources enables the university to recruit and support work in energy research across a range of disciplines and colleges. SER promotes interdisciplinary academic, research and outreach programs in engineering, science, economics and environmental policy.