Timothy Bretl, Marco Panesi, and Joshua Rovey have been promoted to full professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Timothy Bretl earned his Ph.D. in 2005 from Stanford University and joined the aerospace engineering faculty at Illinois in 2006 as an assistant professor. He rose to associate professor in 2013 and was named Severns Faculty Scholar in 2021. Bretl is affiliated with numerous other campus departments and units, including: The Neuroscience Program, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He also serves as the associate head of the Department of Aerospace Engineering.
Marco Panesi earned his Ph.D. in 2009 from von Kármán Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium and the Università degli Studi di Pisa in Italy. After two years as a research associate at the University of Texas Austin, he joined the faculty at Illinois as an assistant professor. Since 2014, he has also been affiliated with the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering. Panesi was made an associate professor in 2018. He is also the director of the Center for Hypersonics and Entry Systems Studies at UIUC.
Joshua Rovey received a Ph.D. in 2006 from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Before coming to Illinois, Rovey was a research engineer at Starfire Industries for two years. He became an assistant professor, then associate, at Missouri University of Science and Technology for almost 10 years. Rovey joined the faculty at Illinois as an associate professor in 2017. In addition, Rovey has served since 2019 as the director of the Illinois Space Grant Consortium.