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Three news chairs named in 2026
The University at Buffalo has appointed Adrienne Decker, Edward Snell and Amjad Aref to chair in their departments.
Adrienne Decker, Department of Engineering Education, joined UB in 2019, and worked as the department's director of graduate studies for five years. Decker is an emergering leader in higher education. She has completed the prestigious ELATES at Drexel fellowship, a national leadership devleopment program designed to elevate senior STEM faculty, and has held multiple leadership roles in the Association of Computing Machinery, including chair of the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education.
Edward Snell, Department of Materials Design and Innovation, is an internationally recognized biophysicist whose research focuses on x-ray interactions with materials, particularly in the biological sciences. He was director of BioXFEL, an NSF Science and Technology Center that secured over $47 million in funding. He is also a fellow of the American Crystallographic Association. Prior to joining UB, Snell was a staff scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center Biophysics Laboratory.
Amjad Aref, Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering will begin his tenure as chair on July 1, 2026. He is a fellow of both the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the ASCE Structural Engineers Institute. He served as the department’s director of graduate studies for civil engineering and led UB’s Structural Engineering and Earthquake Simulation Laboratory for three years. Aref’s research focuses on earthquake and blast engineering, applied and computational mechanics and multiphysics problems.
