Three faculty members in the George R. Brown School of Engineering have been named to endowed chairs, effective July 1.
Junichiro Kono, professor of electrical and computer engineering, of materials science and nanoengineering, of physics and astronomy, and chair of applied physics, will become the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor in Engineering.
Daniel Kowal, assistant professor of statistics (STAT), will become the Dobelman Family Assistant Professor of STAT.
Jamie Padgett, professor of civil engineering, will become the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Engineering.
In 2017, Kowal earned his Ph.D. in statistical science, with a minor in finance, from Cornell University. He received a B.A. in mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis in 2012 and a master’s degree in statistics from Cornell in 2015. He joined the Rice faculty in 2017.
Kowal's research focuses on statistical methods for massive data sets with complex dependence structures, including functional, time series and spatial data. He recently received the ARO Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office for his work on “Optimal Bayesian Approximations for Targeted Prediction.”