IFEES PAST PRESIDENTS
Claudio Borri, 2006 – 2008 | Italy
Claudio Borri studied Civil Engineering at Univ. of Florence (Italy) and (later on) at Ruhr-Univ. Bochum (Germany), achieving the Degree in Civil Engineering in 1978 and the Ph.D. in Structural Mechanics in 1982. He was appointed as Research Assoc. (1983-90), then as Assoc. Professor (1991-2002) and later as Full professor of Computational Mechanics of Structures and Chair of Wind Engineering, School of Engineering, University of Florence (Italy); there he has also served for two decades as the Vice-Dean for International Affairs (1992-2012). In 1992 Prof. Borri was the co-founder of CRIACIV (i.e. the Inter-University Research Centre on Building Aerodynamics & Wind Engineering), and responsible of developing the first Italian Wind Engrg. Lab. with a Boundary-Layer Wind Tunnel (CRIACIV groups, till nowadays, 8 Italian Universities and is the oldest research center of this kind in Italy). In 2004 Prof. Borri was elected as Director of CRIACIV; in 2004 he was elected as the Head (Direttore) of CRIACIV, a function which he kept until the end of 2012; when (October 2012), he was elected as the Dean & Head (Direttore) of the Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, DICEA, of the v. of Florence (Dec. 2012 – Oct. 2016).
Lueny Morell, 2008 – 2010 | Puerto Rico
Lueny Morell, MS, PE, Ing.Paed.IGIP was a co-founder of IFEES and served as Past President. She was an important voice in the creation of the GEDC and Student Platform for Engineering Education Development and the Founder & Director of InnovaHiEd, a world-class team of experts with extensive academic and industry experience offering services to help higher education leaders in transforming their institutions to better respond to their stakeholders’ needs and the socioeconomic development challenges they face. The Lueny Morell Award has been created in honor of Lueny’s masterful achievements in engineering education.
Krishna Vedula, 2010 – 2012 | United States of America
Krishna Vedula was former Professor of Chemical Engineering and Dean Emeritus, Francis College of Engineering, University of Massachusetts Lowell. Dr. Vedula is founder and executive director of the Indo-Universal Collaboration for Engineering Education (IUCEE) facilitated initially by American Society for Engineering Educaton (ASEE). IUCEE has the objective of improving quality and global relevance of engineering education in India and US. He has also been the President of IFEES (International Federation for Engineering Societies) from 2010 to2012. Dr. Vedula is well recognized globally for his contributions to engineering education, research, administration and outreach. He is internationally recognized for his research in processing and properties of materials for high temperature applications. He has been made a Fellow of American Society for Metals (ASM) and a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). Dr. Vedula has B.Tech (IIT Bombay, 1967), M.S. (Drexel University, 1969) and Ph.D. (Michigan Tech University, 1980) degrees in Materials Engineering. He has 30 years academic teaching and research experience in materials science and engineering as well as engineering administration, at Case Western Reserve University, Iowa State University and University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Jose Quadrado, 2012 – 2014 | Portugal
José Carlos Quadrado was born on May 16, 1968, in Lisbon, Portugal. He is know as innovative, a good communicator and an experienced president of engineering institute and international leader in engineering education worldwide. He holds a full professorship position with tenure on electrical machines in the Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa (ISEL), one of the leading and the oldest reference-engineering public institutes in Portugal. He has a BSc in Energy and Power Systems (1989), a diploma degree in Electrical Engineering, Automation and Industrial Electronics from ISEL (1991), a MSc (1994) and a Doctor degree (2000) in Electrical Engineering and Computers from Lisbon Technical University (UTL). He also holds the Habilitation degree (Aggregation) in Electrical Engineering (2007) from Beira Interior University (UBI). He held the position of president of the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies (IFEES) and the position of past president of the Ibero-American Engineering Education Association (ASIBEI), and past vice-president of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI).
Uriel Cukierman, 2014 – 2016 | Argentina
Uriel Rubén Cukierman received a professional degree in Electronic Engineering from the
Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN), Argentina, and a master’s degree in Enterprise
Information Systems Management from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain. He is presently working on his PhD thesis in the area of Learning Sciences at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina. Formerly dean of the School of Engineering at the Universidad de Palermo (UP) and a professor at UTN, he has served as the Information & Communications Technologies Secretary (equivalent to a VP position) at UTN, the largest Engineering School in Argentina, for more than 15 years. He co-chaired and hosted the World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF) 2012, the largest ever engineering education conference, coordinating with eight different global organizations, several government agencies and corporate sponsors. Not only was it a huge success for students and faculty, but for the conference committee, as they were able to break even financially.
Michael Auer, 2016 – 2018 | Austria
Prof. Dr. (mult) Michael E. Auer was Vice-Rector and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Carinthia University of Applied Sciences Villach and Professor for Microelectronics at University of Klagenfurt, Austria. His current research is directed to technology enhanced learning and remote working environments, especially in engineering. Michael Auer is founder and chair of the annual international IEEE EDUCON, ICL and REV conferences, and chair or member of the Program Committees of several international conferences and workshops. Michael Auer is Founding-President and CEO of the “International Association of Online Engineering” (IAOE) since 2006, a non-governmental organization that promotes the vision of new engineering working environments worldwide. In 2009 he was appointed as a member of the Advisory Board of the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG).
Ramiro Jordan, 2018 – 2020 | United States of America
Dr. Ramiro Jordan is a scientist, innovator, educator and entrepreneur. He is a faculty member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at the University of New Mexico, and is currently the Associate Dean of Engineering for International Programs. His research activities include sustainability, Smart Grid, cognitive radio, multi-dimensional signal processing, and software development. Dr. Jordan is a founder of the Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium (ISTEC), a successful non-profit organization that was created in 1990 with the mission to accelerate STEM education, R&D and entrepreneurship in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. ISTEC is comprised of over 100 educational, research, industrial, and multilateral organizations throughout the Americas and Iberia, and is now reaching into the global arena.
Alaa Ashmawy, 2020 – 2022 | Egypt
Dr. Alaa K. Ashmawy is the President of Deraya University in Egypt. He was formerly Professor of Civil Engineering and Dean of the School of Engineering at the American University in Dubai (AUD). He moved to the Dubai in 2006 from the University of South Florida in Tampa (Florida, USA), where he had been a tenured Associate Professor. He earned his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University in West Lafayette (Indiana, USA), and his Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering with Distinction from Alexandria University (Egypt). He also held interim appointments with the geosystems group at Georgia Tech in Atlanta (USA) as a research fellow, the National Research Centre in Cairo (Egypt) as a visiting researcher, and at the Universidád de las Americas in Puebla (Mexico) as a visiting professor.
