MARCY, N.Y. — SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly) begins the new year with new leadership. The SUNY board of trustees on Dec. 29 appointed SUNY Provost Tod Laursen as SUNY Poly’s acting president. His appointment is effective immediately. A search for a permanent SUNY Poly president will begin “shortly,” SUNY said in a news release. […]
MARCY, N.Y. — SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly) begins the new year with new leadership.
The SUNY board of trustees on Dec. 29 appointed SUNY Provost Tod Laursen as SUNY Poly’s acting president. His appointment is effective immediately. A search for a permanent SUNY Poly president will begin “shortly,” SUNY said in a news release.
Laursen assumes the duties previously held by Jinliu (Grace) Wang, who had been serving as interim president of SUNY Poly for more than two years. Wang stepped down from her position Nov. 30 to become executive VP at Ohio State University.
In her new role, Wang joins former SUNY Chancellor Kristina Johnson who became the 16th president of Ohio State University at the start of this academic year.
Laursen will work with SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatras to ensure a smooth transition of his current responsibilities as senior vice chancellor and provost of SUNY system administration. Malatras has appointed Fatemeh (Shadi) Shahedipour-Sandvik as provost-in-charge, SUNY said.
Laursen has served as senior vice chancellor and provost since September 2018. He joined SUNY from Khalifa University (KU) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where he was the founding president and served as its leader since 2010.
Prior to becoming president of Khalifa University, Laursen was a member of the faculty of Duke University between 1992 and 2010, during which time he had appointments in civil engineering, biomedical engineering, and mechanical engineering.
He served as chair of Duke’s department of mechanical engineering and materials science from 2008 to 2010. He also served as senior associate dean for education in the Pratt School of Engineering from 2003 to 2008. In the latter capacity, he had oversight responsibility for all undergraduate and graduate engineering programs at Duke, SUNY said.
Laursen earned his Ph.D. and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in the same subject from Oregon State University. He specializes in computational mechanics, a subfield of engineering mechanics involving development of new computational algorithms and tools used by engineers to analyze mechanical and structural systems.
He has published more than 100 articles, book chapters, and abstracts, and has authored or co-edited two books. His particular focus is development of methods to analyze contact, impact, and frictional phenomena in highly nonlinear and complex systems.
Laursen is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the International Association of Computational Mechanics, and the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics. Additionally, he has served on the scientific advisory committees of several of the “most important” national and international congresses in computational mechanics, SUNY said.