Chew and Panesi promoted to associate professor

Huck Beng Chew and Marco Panesi have both been promoted from assistant to associate professor with tenure in the Department of Aerospace Engineering.

Chew holds three degrees in mechanical engineering from the National University of Singapore: BS ’01, MS ’03, and PhD ’07. He did his postdoctoral studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island from 2008 to 2011 where he was promoted to Assistant Professor of Research at Brown University in 2011.

In the fall of 2011, Chew joined the faculty at the University of Illinois as an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and as an affiliate assistant professor in the Department of Computational Science and Engineering.

Chew conducts research on the nano and micro mechanics of small-scale material structures using computational-based simulations. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, and a registered Chartered Environmental Engineer.

Panesi earned a master’s degree in aerospace engineering in 2003 from Università di Pisa in Italy. He also earned a master’s degree in applied fluid dynamics in 2005 and a doctorate in 2009 from von Kármán Institute for Fluid Dynamics (VKI) in Belgium.

Prior to coming to the U of I in 2012, Panesi had several appointments, including as a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Science (ICES) and a visiting scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California for three years. In 2012, he joined the faculty in the Department of Aerospace Engineering as an assistant professor. Since 2014, he has also held a position as affiliate professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering.

Panesi conducts research in the areas of plasma dynamics and lasers, computational fluid mechanics, and aerothermochemistry. Panesi has been recognized for his expertise with an Air Force Young Investigator Program Award and a NASA Early CAREER Faculty Award. He won the 2016 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research for Assistant Professors in the College of Engineering at Illinois.

Panesi is a member of the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and of the Plasmadynamics & Lasers Technical Committee. He is a senior member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.