UT Knoxville College of Engineering Names Penumadu Head of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Dr. Dayakar Penumadu
KNOXVILLE -– Dr. Dayakar Penumadu, who has been serving as the interim head of the University of Tennessee Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) since 2007, has been named as permanent head and Fred M. Peebles Professor, effective immediately.
Penumadu received his Bachelor of Science degree from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, India; two Master of Science degrees, one from the University of Kentucky and the other from Purdue University; and his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, all in civil engineering.
Penumadu joined the College of Engineering faculty in 2001. He was previously an associate professor at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York.
Penumadu currently holds the Joint Institute for Advanced Materials (JIAM) Chair of Excellence. He is also currently serving as the Principal Investigator for A Beam Line Proposal at Oak Ridge’s Spallation Neutron Source to establish A Neutron Imaging Facility - VENUS for which a beam port allocation was obtained successfully from the Neutron Scattering Science Advisory Council (NSSAC) of SNS in November of 2008.
He is the recipient of numerous teaching and research awards including the Research Faculty Award in 2002, the Outstanding Teacher Award in 2003 and the Scholar Faculty Award in 2006, all from the UT CEE department; the Moses E. and Mayme Brooks Distinguished Professor Award from the College of Engineering (COE) in 2006; and he was named as a COE Research Fellow for 2003-2004 and 2004-2005.
Penumadu’s multidisciplinary research has resulted in numerous grants and contracts, including a $1.9 million project for the National Science Foundation that is scheduled to run through 2013, and he is currently the Principal Investigator for research activities funded by the Office of Naval Research, the Spallation Neutron Source, General Motors and the UTK-ORNL Joint Institute of Neutron Sciences (JINS) Fellowship Program.
Penumadu assumes the leadership of the CEE department during a time of exciting new opportunities and challenges. Groundbreaking is scheduled for later this year on a new Civil and Environmental Engineering/Industrial and Information Building that will be constructed on Neyland Drive behind Pasqua Hall, and the department will be moving personnel, offices and laboratories to the new facility within the next two to three years.
For more information, contact Kim Cowart, Communications Manager, Office of Engineering Communications, at (865) 974-0686/kcowart@utk.edu.