Hanover
Laura Ray, who has been at Dartmouth for 22 years, will begin work as interim dean as a search committee looks for a permanent replacement for Joseph Helble, who has led Thayer for 13 years and becomes Dartmouth provost at the end of October.
Ray graduated from Princeton University in 1984 and went on to earn a master’s degree from Stanford University and a doctorate from Princeton in mechanical and aerospace engineering.
She has helped develop robots to be used for scientific research in polar regions, according to Dartmouth’s website.
She also has been active in Dartmouth’s academic cluster initiative related to computational science.
“Professor Ray is one of Thayer’s most experienced senior faculty members, a talented scholar, teacher and entrepreneur. I am confident that the engineering school will be in great hands under her leadership this coming year,” Heible said on the Dartmouth website.
“I’m very excited about the appointment,” Ray said. “My role as interim dean will be to keep the momentum going at Thayer and make sure that the next dean can hit the ground running.”
Dartmouth is embarking on a major expansion in the so-called west end of its campus, with a $155 million building planned for Thayer and Dartmouth’s computer science department.
The search committee for a new dean will be chaired by Eric Fossum, an emerging technologies professor at Dartmouth who also is associate provost for entrepreneurship and technology transfer and director of Thayer’s PhD Innovation Program.