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UW Tacoma SET Welcomes New Faculty

October 12, 2021

New faculty include civil engineering, mechanical engineering and computer science and systems professors.

The University of Washington Tacoma School of Engineering & Technology is honored to welcome six new faculty members to our community. These hires will inform education in the school’s undergraduate and graduate programs. The scholars join the school with expertise ranging from civil and mechanical engineering to computer science and systems.

“These faculty members will enable new programs in mechanical and civil engineering, as well as support our computer science and systems program” said Raj Katti, Dean of the UW Tacoma SET. “They will offer courses and perform research in areas such as environmental engineering, geo-technical engineering, transportation engineering, structural engineering and the mechanics of solids.” According to Katti, these programs and courses will help better position graduates for technology jobs in the Puget Sound area.

Below are short biographies of the six individuals who have joined the Husky family:

Emese Hadgany

Emese Hadnagy

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Emese Hadgany

Emese Hadnagy

Dr. Emese Hadnagy joins as the Civil Engineering Program Chair and Associate Professor. Dr. Hadnagy has a broad interest in environmental pollution prevention and hazard mitigation in water and related matrices and the common thread of her research is to understand the physicochemical processes that control the fate, transport, and remediation of environmental contaminants. Her research to-date has led to more than $750K in funded grants. At UWT, she plans to collaborate with the Center for Urban Waters, focusing on stormwater pollution and contaminant mobility in coastal communities. Prior to joining UWT, Dr. Hadnagy was a tenured associate professor in civil engineering at the University of New Haven in Connecticut, where she also directed the fully online and the on-ground MS Environmental Engineering programs. She received her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of New Hampshire.

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Angela Kitali

Angela Kitali

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Angela Kitali

Angela Kitali

Dr. Angela Kitali joins as a Civil Engineering Assistant Professor. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the Florida International University in December 2020. She received her M.S. degree in Civil Engineering from the University of North Florida and B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Her research focuses on using real-time data and applying data-driven, statistical, and machine learning approaches to improve highway safety and traffic operations.

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Lorne Arnold

Lorne Arnold

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Lorne Arnold

Lorne Arnold

Dr. Lorne Arnold joins as a Civil Engineering Assistant Professor. He worked for Hart Crowser in Seattle as an Associate Geotechnical Engineer and has obtained his PE license. He received his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering with a focus on geotechnical engineering from the University of Washington Seattle in 2016. His research focuses on slope stability and resiliency. As a long-time Tacoma resident, Dr. Arnold is committed to outreach to the local community, emphasizing supporting local students to pursue STEM degrees.

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Jeffrey Walters

Jeffrey Walters

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Jeffrey Walters

Jeffrey Walters

Dr. Jeffrey Walters is a Civil Engineering Assistant Professor and co-founder of Open Water Systems. He received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2015. He was an Assistant Professor at Universidad Diego Portales from 2016-2018 and at George Fox University in Newberg, OR from 2018-2021. His research focus and passion center on developing rigorous, practical, and accessible ways to apply complexity science and systems thinking to tackle entrenched challenges inhibiting sustainable and equitable development worldwide.  He seeks to integrate theory and application of systems thinking and engineering for social justice in his engineering classes. These research projects have resulted in 19 peer-reviewed articles published in high-impact science, technology, project management, and education journals targeting global infrastructure development.

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Matthew Ford

Matthew Ford

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Matthew Ford

Matthew Ford

Dr. Matthew Ford is a Mechanical Engineering Assistant Teaching Professor. He was a postdoctoral associate in the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at Cornell University and completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University on mechanics of structures in 2018, with a strong focus on teaching practice. In his previous role with the Cornell Active Learning Initiative, Dr. Ford worked to transform the core mechanical engineering curriculum as a teaching specialist and leader in a multi-year assessment of the program. Dr. Ford is a member of the American Society of Engineering Education and has published in the areas of student motivation, inquiry-based learning, and assessment of learning. He has been working enthusiastically to support underrepresented students both inside and outside the classroom.

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Ling-Hong Hung

Ling-Hong Hung

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Ling-Hong Hung

Ling-Hong Hung

Dr. Ling-Hong Hung is a Research Assistant Professor focused on fast cloud-based analysis of big biomedical data accessible to scientists and clinicians. He receives funding through grants and contracts from the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute and is the co-founder and CTO of Biodepot LLC. He holds a doctorate in Biochemistry from the University of Western Ontario. He also has been primarily writing software for more than 20 years and has taught courses in both Biochemistry and software engineering. Current projects include using serverless cloud instances for supercomputing, real-time DNA sequence analysis using hand-held devices, and combining genomics with bio-imaging data.

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Written by Haneen Hindi
Photos by Ryan Moriarty
School of Engineering & Technology

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