In August, 2017, Dr. Keith J. Bowman became Dean of the College of the College of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), one of the fastest rising engineering and computing colleges at a US public, research university. Total COEIT enrollment is over 4500 students supported by nearly 200 faculty and staff. Dr. Bowman also became the Constellation Professor of Information Technology and Engineering upon joining UMBC.
Dr. Bowman began his academic career in 1988 as a Purdue University Assistant Professor after receiving BS and MS degrees from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and a PhD degree from the University of Michigan. He served as a visiting professor and received Alexander von Humboldt stipends for research at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany in 1996 and 2002 and he served as a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia in 2003. From 1996 to 2004 he served as graduate program chair of the Purdue School of Materials Engineering (MSE) during a substantial retooling of the program to more strongly emphasize doctoral degrees. In 2005-06 he served a one-year appointment as Interim Head of MSE and from 2007 to 2011 served as Head of the Purdue School of Materials Engineering. He was named a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society in 2000 and has held several division and society-wide positions. Awards at Purdue University include receiving the MSE Best Teaching Award in 1992 and 1995 and Purdue’s highest teaching award, the Charles Murphy Undergraduate Teaching Award in 1995. In 2003 Professor Bowman’s name was added to the Purdue Book of Great Teachers. In 2007, he received the Purdue College of Engineering Mentoring Award and he became the first Professor of Engineering Education (by courtesy) from MSE. In 2012, he was invested as the first Duchossois Leadership Professor in the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Armour College of Engineering soon after joining as chair of Mechanical (ME), Materials and Aerospace (AE) Engineering.
Dr. Bowman served as advisor or co-advisor to twenty-two Purdue master’s students and twenty-four Purdue doctoral students. His research group led efforts to quantify and model preferred orientation and property anisotropy in ceramics and ceramic composites with expansion recently into describing properties and performance of lead free piezoelectric and pharmaceutical materials. He has also developed steadily growing activities in engineering education research with efforts in development of curricular materials for math and science education from elementary to high school levels as well as
engineering and computing education at all levels. He has worked on assessment approaches for engineering education and studied trends for gender, racial and ethnic diversity across engineering disciplines. He has developed or co-developed six undergraduate and six graduate courses and was strongly engaged in accreditation preparations for the Purdue MSE undergraduate curriculum and at IIT during the successful ABET re-accreditation of the ME, AE and MSE degree programs. Professor Bowman has given plenary, invited or contributed research presentations in twenty countries and had longstanding collaborations with colleagues in Germany and Australia.
Dr. Bowman has over 190 publications including the textbook “An Introduction to Mechanical Behavior of Materials” (Wiley, 2004). He has been PI for research awards and sponsored contracts exceeding $9 million and a co-PI for awards and contracts totaling more than $10 million.
Dr. Bowman served as Dean of the College of Science & Engineering (CoSE) at San Francisco State University (SF State), an urban, public comprehensive university in the twenty-three campus California State University System. He joined SF State following four years leading the MMAE department at IIT with an interest in understanding SF State’s outstanding success in advancing a diverse group of undergraduate and graduate students to research careers in science and engineering. CoSE consists of nine academic units and six centers, more than four hundred faculty and staff and about six thousand majors. CoSE’s broad range of degree programs includes four engineering disciplines, several concentrations in biology, chemistry & biochemistry, computer science, earth & climate science, environmental science, geography, marine sciences, mathematics, physics & astronomy and psychology. CoSE’s annual finances consist of approximately $25 million in general fund expenditures and an average of nearly $14 million in research and sponsored projects. In addition to having operations across five buildings on the SF State Holloway campus, the college has research, teaching, environmental monitoring and outreach activities across Northern California, including two remote sites, the Estuary and Ocean Science (EOS) Center at the Romberg Tiburon Campus and the Sierra Nevada Field Campus. EOS hosts nearly 180 faculty, staff and students at a fifty-three-acre site in Marin County that is also the only academic research center on the San Francisco Bay.
In San Francisco, Dr. Bowman extended his experience in education and community engagement projects focused on advancing diversity and inclusion, with a broad cross-section of current activities. For a new CSME project, San Francisco: Computing for all Levels and Learners (SF CALL) Dean Bowman served as principal investigator. SF CALL is from the first round of National Science Foundation (NSF) pilot grants in the Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (INCLUDES) program. SF CALL is a partnership between SF State’s College of Science and Engineering, Graduate College of Education and Metro Student Success Program along with the San Francisco Unified School District and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce to advance computing education. Dr. Bowman served as co-chair of the San Francisco STEM Talent Pathway, a key project of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce’s inclusive workforce and education program called UniteSF. He served as internal advisory chair to the joint SF State and University of California, San Francisco project called SF BUILD (Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity), a project funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for Enhancing the Diversity of the NIH-funded Workforce.