Trustees Approve Faculty Promotions

Promotions and tenure appointments for Harvey Mudd College faculty were approved during the January meeting of the HMC Board of Trustees and will become effective July 1, 2019.

Jim Boerkoel

Upon discussion and the recommendation of the Academic Affairs Committee, the board unanimously approved Jim Boerkoel (computer science) for tenure and promotion to associate professor. Boerkoel specializes in human robot interaction, artificial intelligence and interaction design—designing better human computer interactions. He directs the Human Experience & Agent Teamwork Lab with the goal of developing techniques that augment humans’ own cognitive and physical abilities to create integrated human-agent teams that are more capable than their individual counterparts. In 2017, Boerkoel received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation for his project “CAREER: Robust and Reliable Multiagent Scheduling Under Uncertainty.” This work will improve the robustness and reliability in applications such as autonomous driving, automated warehousing and personal robots by addressing fundamental limitations in how current planning systems handle real-world scheduling uncertainty.

Tanja Srebotnjak

Tanja Srebotnjak, Hixon Professor of Sustainable Environmental Design was reappointed for a second, two-year term. The inaugural director of the Hixon Center for Sustainable Environmental Design, her research interests focus on the development and application of statistical methods for describing and analyzing a range of environmental issues.

Five assistant professors were approved by the Academic Affairs Committee for a second reappointment: Katherine Breeden (computer science), Nicholas Breznay ’02 (physics), Leah Mendelson (engineering), David Seitz (humanities, social sciences, and the arts) and Brian Shuve (physics).