Written by: Larry D Frost August 14, 2012 Dr. Pat Reardon Dr. Pat Reardon received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1993 from UAH. After a couple of stints in industry in Huntsville, Pat came to the Center for Applied Optics in 1998, and has worked his way up to be the Interim Director. He was appointed Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, effective October 1, 2012. His area of expertise is in various kinds of optical metrology instrumentation. The levels of precision in terms of surface roughness of the kinds of optical surfaces he develops is of the order of tens of nanometers. Dr. Ying-Cheng Lin The College of Engineering at UAH is very pleased to welcome Dr. Ying-Cheng Lin, appointed as Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering in August 2012. Dr. Ying-Cheng Lin's research areas include the behavior and design of steel structures, seismic performance-based design, nonlinear modeling and analysis, and the reliability analysis of structural systems. He was awarded the Best Oral Presentation Award at the 8th International Conference on Urban Earthquake Engineering, Tokyo, Japan in 2011 and received the P.C. Rossin Doctoral Fellowship, College of Engineering and Applied Science at Lehigh University in2010 and 2011. Dr. Lin earned his Bachelor's in civil engineering and M.S. in structural engineering from the National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Lehigh University in 2012. His Ph.D. research was part of the NSF NEESR-SG project on self-centering damage-free seismic-resistant steel frame systems. His research focus was to improve the resilience of civil infrastructures by improving connection behavior and system performance of steel structures using innovative technologies. Dr. K. Gabriel Xu The College of Engineering at UAH is very pleased to welcome Dr. Gabriel Xu, appointed as Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, effective August 2012. As an undergraduate student, Dr. Xu was a Space Scholar at the Air Force Research Laboratory and an intern with the Boeing Commercial Aircraft Company. As a graduate student, he was a Research Assistant in the High-Power Electric Propulsion Laboratory at Georgia Tech. Dr. Xu's research interest is experimental plasma science as applied to problems in propulsion, energy, materials processing, and combustion. He is joining UAH after recently completing a Ph.D. dissertation focused on improving the performance of Hall thrusters, a plasma-based propulsion system for spacecraft. Dr. Xu received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. George Nelson The College of Engineering at UAH is very pleased to welcome Dr. George Nelson, appointed as Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, effective August 2012. During his undergraduate studies, he was aGeorgia HOPE Scholar and an engineering co-op for Pratt & Whitney. As a graduate student, he held both research and teaching assistantships. His general research interests include transport phenomena, energy storage and conversiondevices, sustainable energy systems, and multi-scale modeling and analysis. He specializes in the investigation of mass and charge transport in fuel cells and batteries. Dr. Nelson is joining UAH after three years as an Assistant research Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Nelson received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
