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Madison, WI
The University of Wisconsin–Madison has appointed Devesh Ranjan, a mechanical engineer and a leader at one of the country’s largest and highest-ranked engineering programs, as the tenth dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He first arrived at UW–Madison in 2003 to begin graduate school in the college he will now lead. He will begin on June 16.
Ranjan said, “The thing I say about UW–Madison is if you dream about doing something here, it will happen. It will happen because of the opportunity and the support here for you at UW–Madison.”
“We are very fortunate to bring an engineer with Professor Ranjan’s energy and vision back to Madison,” says Provost Charles Isbell Jr. “His commitment to people and paving the way for their success is a perfect fit for a time of growth at the College of Engineering.”
“We are a college which has absolutely phenomenal students both at undergraduate and graduate level. They are truly the best and the brightest in the world,” he says. “But they also have amazing faculty and staff members to support them — people who have been there for 15, 20 years. They love the place. They really want to do bigger things with this new building coming in.”
Ranjan is excited to arrive at a moment when input from the college’s students, staff and faculty — and input from stakeholders around Wisconsin, including future employers of the college’s alums and beneficiaries of their research — can contribute to a strategic vision for the next five or 10 years, and he can back it with the fundraising acumen he developed at Georgia Tech.
After earning a doctorate at UW–Madison in 2007 in the lab of Prof. Riccardo Bonazza, Ranjan was a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory before joining the faculty at Texas A&M University in 2009. He moved to Georgia Tech in 2014. In January of 2022, he became School Chair of Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.
In 2021, Ranjan became a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which presented him with its Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award for outstanding achievement in Mechanical Engineering in 2023. He was tapped for a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and US Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award in 2013 and became Georgia Tech’s first recipient of a Department of Energy Early Career Award in 2016.
Ranked among the nation’s top engineering colleges, the UW–Madison College of Engineering enrolls approximately 6,500 undergraduate and graduate students across eight academic departments.
