Indian-American Professor Tejal Desai Elected Dean of Brown University, School of Engineering

Desai is an expert in using micro-and nano-scale technologies to develop new methods of delivering medicine to specific sites in the human body.

FREMONT CA: The next dean of the School of Engineering at Brown University, an Ivy League university in Providence, Rhode Island, is none other than an Indian American professor Tejal Desai. In an Ivy League university, Desai will begin her tenure on September 1, 2022, and lead the third oldest engineering program in the US and the oldest in an Ivy League university. She will work with the motive to expand collective engineering research and teaching as a professor and researcher and has led academic programs at the University of California, San Francisco, and Boston University.

Desai is one among the few women in top positions in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs, and presently, being attached with the University of California, San Francisco, she is expected to join a noble group of Indian American professors in leadership roles in US universities. Desai, a 1994 graduate of Brown University with a bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering, in a press release, said that Brown engineers tend to be people with a very specific drive to enhance the environment around them. Students come to Brown because they want to make a difference in the world, and they see engineering as a tremendous tool for doing so.

Desai is an expert in using micro-and nano-scale technologies to develop new methods of delivering medicine to specific sites in the human body. She is also a former long-time chair of the department of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), as well as the inaugural director of UCSF's Health Innovations via Engineering (HIVE) initiative. She has previously held academic leadership positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Boston University, and UCSF, and she is a member of Brown University's biomedical engineering advisory board.

Desai's responsibilities will include expanding the school's research enterprise focusing on critical societal issues and enhancing research and teaching collaboration within the school and across campus. A significant focus will be to continue to diversify the student body at all levels and recruit and retain additional teachers from historically underrepresented groups.