Students walk past O'Shaughnessy Science Hall and across Sabo Plaza September 14, 2015.

Former Dean of Engineering at Loyola Marymount Named New Provost

St. Thomas welcomes the new executive vice president and provost, Dr. Richard Plumb.
Plumb

Plumb

The University of St. Thomas is pleased to welcome Dr. Richard Plumb as the new executive vice president and provost. An electrical engineer specializing in numerical electromagnetics, Plumb previously served as dean of the Seaver College of Science and Engineering at Loyola Marymount University.

During his tenure at Loyola Marymount, Plumb developed and carried out the college’s first strategic plan and worked with the liberal arts and business colleges to create joint academic programs. He also helped to raise $70 million toward a new $80 million life sciences building, which will open in the summer of 2015.

In 1998, Plumb became professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Seven years later, Loyola Marymount appointed him dean of sciences and engineering, a school that includes 85 full-time faculty, 30 professional staff, 1,100 undergraduate majors and 850 graduate students.

Plumb earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Syracuse University. He chose to pursue his graduate degrees at Syracuse because one of the world’s foremost experts in the discipline (Roger Harrington) taught there.

During graduate school, Plumb worked as a program engineer in the Military Electronics Systems Operation at General Electric. He was an assistant visiting professor at Syracuse for a year before moving to the University of Kansas in 1989 as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was promoted to associate professor in 1994 and served as acting director of the Radar Systems and Remote Sensing Laboratory at Kansas in 1997-1998.

Plumb became a noted researcher on electromagnetics and ground-penetrating radar. Over an 11-year period from 1992 to 2003, he received $1.7 million for 13 sponsored research projects as a principal investigator and $3 million for seven projects as a co-investigator, with most of the funds coming from corporations or government agencies.

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