Penn State Announces Promotions for Three Great Valley Faculty Members

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Penn State Great Valley Nittany Lion
Image via Penn State Great Valley.

Penn State has announced promotions for tenure-line and nontenure-line faculty, including three Penn State Great Valley faculty members, effective Friday, July 1.

“Promotion is a recognition of faculty member’s contributions to their field and expertise as an educator,” said Penn State Great Valley Interim Chancellor, Dean, and Chief Academic Officer Colin Neill. “These professors have been acknowledged by their colleagues and peers as leaders within their respective disciplines. We are proud of their accomplishments and grateful for their dedication to their students and the campus.”

Ronnie Godshalk, associate chief academic officer, added, “We are very proud of our colleagues and celebrate their accomplishments! Each of our faculty members who have achieved promotion and tenure have been recognized for their research contributions to their fields, their exceptional teaching in the classroom and advising students, and their service to the campus, the university, the profession and the community at large.”

Since joining Great Valley as an associate professor, Badr has supported increased industry-academia partnerships, including via student-industry collaboration on capstone projects. He has also served as a mentor and adviser for Great Valley students participating in the Nittany AI Challenge.

“Penn State gave me numerous opportunities to spread my wings beyond my boundaries,” Badr said. “It is also a stimulating environment that sparks my intellectual curiosity and inspires me to thrive for excellence.”

Badr’s current research interests lie primarily in the field of trustworthy AI service systems. He investigates a multidisciplinary and systematic approach to integrating AI, the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchains to design and deploy reliable and secure AI systems.

Badr has received campus awards for faculty service and faculty innovation. He is a lifetime member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Penn State representative to the LF AI & Data Foundation, an umbrella foundation of the Linux Foundation that supports open source innovation in AI and data.

“I am deeply indebted to colleagues and friends who played a significant role in my achievements,” Badr said. “I also take this time especially to appreciate the unconditional love of my kids: Raphaël, Chloé and Carmen. My gratitude to them is infinite and endless.”

Sangwan joined Great Valley in 2003 after more than seven years in industry, where he worked mostly with large software-intensive systems in healthcare, automation, transportation, and mining. He currently serves as the professor-in-charge of the campus’ Master of Software Engineering program and as director of the Big Data Lab.

Sangwan has received the campus’ faculty teaching and faculty research and scholarship awards. He actively consults for Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton and holds a visiting scientist appointment at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

In his six years at Great Valley, Negahban has received two campus research awards and was named to the inaugural class of VISTA Millennial Superstars. His video labs and simulation-based learning modules have received worldwide publicity and are used by faculty at various leading institutions.

Negahban’s research on immersive simulation-based learning spans multiple Penn State campuses; he is the principal investigator of a team that received an $831,276 grant from the National Science Foundation in June 2020. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Google, Microsoft, and several research institutes.

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