New Faculty, Staff Appointed in the College of Engineering
Dr.
Jeffrey D. Niemann joins the Department of Civil Engineering this fall as an
assistant professor in the areas of hydrology and geomorphology. Niemann earned
his M.S. and Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in civil and environmental
engineering and earned a B.S. with high distinction in civil engineering from
the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was a member of the faculty at Pennsylvania
State University prior to joining Colorado State. His professional career includes
serving as a consultant for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Kathmandu,
Nepal, and Dhaka, Bangladesh, and as a research assistant for the International
Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
Niemann's research focuses on the interaction of water and topography and covers a broad range of studies, including soil moisture variability, fractals and scaling invariance, landscape evolution modeling, watershed morphology, interpolation and parameter estimation, hydrologic modeling and impacts of land-use and climate change.
Niemann has received several awards and honors during his academic career, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2002), the Martin Fellowship for Sustainability (1995) and the Chancellor's Recognition Award (1993). He is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Society of Engineering Education.
Hendrik
Dijkstra is a new professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado
State. Dr. Dijkstra's primary areas of research are physical oceanography, including
geophysical fluid dynamics, climate dynamics, and biological oceanography. His
research at Colorado State will focus on using physics as a basis for understanding
the ocean currents and their role in the evolution of climate systems.
Dijkstra earned bachelor degrees in mathematics and astronomy from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He was awarded a master's degree in applied mathematics, graduating cum laude in 1984, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1988. Following graduation, he served as a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University until 1990 when he was offered the position of assistant professor at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. In 2001 he was promoted to Professor of Dynamical Oceanography at Utrecht University and since 2002 has served as Scientific Director of both the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research and the Buys Ballot Research School for Fundamental Processes in the Climate System.
An invited lecturer at Cambridge University and Woods Hole, Dijkstra is known worldwide for his scientific accomplishments. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Scientific Committee on Oceanographic Research, and was an expert reviewer of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is a member of the Dutch Academy of Sciences and Arts. Dijkstra is the author of a book on nonlinear physical oceanography and has published numerous papers in the areas of fluid mechanics and heat/mass transfer as well as geophysical fluid dynamics, physical oceanography and climate dynamics.
The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) recently announced the appointment of two staff members to new managing appointments effective this July. Mary McInnis-Efaw will be the new manager of CIRA and will serve as the day-to-day operating officer replacing Dave Cismoski. She is a member of Colorado State's Administrative Professional Council and has previously assisted CIRA Director Tom Vonder Haar and Deputy Director Ken Eis on a number of special projects.
Lance Noble will be the new associate manager for financial matters and accounting. Noble has extensive experience in this area and has been working with the College of Engineering on budget, billing and financial planning items for several years.