Satish Udpa has been named Michigan State University’s executive vice president for administrative services pending approval by the Board of Trustees.
Udpa will assume his new responsibilities March 18.
Udpa has served as dean of MSU’s College of Engineering for the last seven years. During his term as dean, the college has seen improvements in national rankings, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as increases in enrollment and research productivity.
“Satish Udpa is an enormously respected leader and a terrific collaborator,” MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon said. “His ability to lead and emulate a high-performance culture within the college that yielded concrete results has made him the best candidate for this position, and we now look at how best to infuse a culture of even higher expectations – of ourselves and of each other – throughout our entire enterprise.”
Along with serving as dean, Udpa is a University Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering. His research focuses on materials characterization and nondestructive evaluation, developing noninvasive tools for clinical applications, such as electromagnetic-acoustic methods for detecting failures in artificial heart valves and microwave imaging and ablation therapy systems.
He has published extensively, holds several patents and is the technical editor of the
Electromagnetic Nondestructive Testing Handbook. He also is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Prior to coming to MSU, Udpa was the Whitney Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University.
After working with so many creative and hardworking colleagues in the College of Engineering, Udpa said that accepting the new position is bittersweet.
“I accepted the position only after considerable reflection and introspection,” Udpa said. “Leading the College of Engineering has been one of the most gratifying periods of my life. I am looking forward to helping Michigan State University further its status as a world-renowned research institution.”
The position of executive vice president of administrative services is a newly created post at MSU. In this new role Udpa will be directly responsible for the university’s central human resources and be the lead vice president with the provost for IT operations. Also, he will have shared responsibility with the provost for the Office of Planning and Budgets. His other leadership duties for units and vice presidents come as a result of the vacancy left by Fred Poston, who is now dean of MSU’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Also beginning March 18, Leo Kempel, associate dean for research and professor in the College of Engineering, will be named acting dean of the College of Engineering.
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