The UH Cullen College of Engineering has launched the first Future Faculty Program within the college to prepare top-performing Ph.D. students for a successful career in academia.
The first-of-its-kind program was spearheaded by mechanical engineering department chair and M.D. Anderson Chair Professor Pradeep Sharma, along with associate professor Jagannatha Rao. Together, the two hope to prepare leading graduate students to become successful educators and researchers at top engineering schools around the world.
To achieve this goal, Sharma and Rao stress to students involved in the program that simply completing a great Ph.D. dissertation is not enough. Students in the Future Faculty Program who want to become successful engineering educators and researchers are exposed to the challenges in a faculty search in today's world and are taught how to set goals and expectations at each stage in their academic career.
Currently, only a few other programs like this exist in the country. Sharma and Rao foresee the Future Faculty Program becoming a mainstay within the department and hope to see it grow into a post-Ph.D. completion program.
View photos from the first Future Faculty Program meeting on our Flickr page!