Faculty Appointment Announcement

The appointment of
Stefan Duma

to the
Harry Wyatt
Professorship
at
Virginia Tech’s
College of Engineering

The Virginia Tech Board of Visitors has conferred the Harry Wyatt Professorship to Stefan Duma of biomedical engineering. Wyatt was a Montgomery County, Va., native who graduated from Virginia Tech in 1924 with an electrical engineering degree. He worked at Norfolk and Western Railway, rising to senior vice president in the Roanoke, Va., office. He became a member of the University’s Board of Visitors in 1962, serving as rector in 1964. In 1970 Wyatt died, and his friends in the railroad industry established the professorship in 1985.

Stefan Duma, the head of the biomedical engineering department at Virginia Tech, is internationally recognized for his landmark studies in injury biomechanics and traumatic brain injury. In addition to sports-related injuries, Duma has focused on studies of the mechanisms of injuries for pregnant women in car crashes, the biomechanics of eye injuries, the risk of upper extremity injuries from the deployment of airbags, and the biomechanics of blast injuries suffered by the military.

In January of 2012, Duma and his colleagues, Steven Rowson and Joel Stitzel, also of the biomedical school, received the Brain Trauma Foundation Award for their work on impact biomechanics at a meeting in New York City.

Duma was the founding director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Injury Biomechanics and has personally received more than $35 million in externally funded research from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the Center for Disease Control, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Transportation, as well as a host of industrial sponsors. He has published more than 300 papers and five of his Ph.D. students are now in full-time faculty positions.

Duma’s appointment as department head was made in 2009. In two years, the program moved from an unranked discipline to 39th in the biomedical engineering category of U.S. News’ annual ranking of graduate programs for 2013. Research expenditures doubled in a 24-month period to $20 million annually. Duma has successfully recruited faculty, growing the group from 35 in 2009 to 70 in 2011. His efforts have also attracted more than $2 million in foundation gifts to the school in 2011, up from only $250 in 2009.