HUNTSVILLE, Ala.(September 22, 2011)- The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAHuntsville) College of Engineering (COE) Dean Dr. Shankar Mahalingam recently announced the following faculty appointments: Dr. D. Keith Hollingsworth, Professor and Chair of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE); and Dr. Sarma L. Rani, assistant professor of MAE. Dr. Keith Hollingsworth Before joining UAHuntsville, Hollingsworth was associate professor and associate chair of mechanical engineering and director of MECE graduate studies program at The University of Houston (UH). He also served as associate professor of the biomedical engineering program. His years of teaching, largely in an undergraduate laboratory setting, have been recognized with three college teaching awards. Specifically, he was the recipient of the Faculty Award for Mentoring Undergraduate Research. At UH he graduated a total of 35 research students at the Ph.D., masters and honors thesis levels. Hollingsworth's research interests span several areas of thermal science including boiling and two-phase flows, turbulent convection, liquid crystal thermography, and biomedical heat transfer. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and a recipient of the Herbert Allen Award from the South-Texas Section of ASME for "outstanding technical achievement by an engineer 35 years of age or younger." Hollingsworth received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, and undergraduate and graduate degrees from North Carolina State University. Dr. Sarma L. Rani Sarma L. Rani joins the COE faculty from Huntsville's CFD Research Corporation. His research areas include large eddy simulations and direct numerical simulations of turbulent flows, particle-laden turbulent flows, analytical and computational modeling of combustion instabilities, and radiative heat transfer. He obtained his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, in Pilani, India. Rani obtained a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station. And, he received his Ph.D., in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rani equally carried out post-doctoral research at Cornell University. At both institutions his research focus was on direct numerical and large eddy simulations of particle-laden turbulent flows. For more informationJoyce Anderson-Maples, (256) 874-2101maplesj@uah.edu">maplesj@uah.edu