New year brings new faces to CEE classrooms

Rudy Bonaparte
Bonaparte
Philip Breedlove
Breedlove
John Taylor
Taylor

Several new faces are joining the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty this fall, bringing hard-earned experience from the real-world and new areas of research prowess to the School.

Students in the Global Engineering Leadership and Management course this fall will experience their impact right away: Geosyntec Consultants President and CEO Rudy Bonaparte has joined the School as a professor of the practice and will co-teach the class, which uses industry leaders and a variety of faculty members to teach students the basic principles of leadership in engineering environments.

Bonaparte, who is stepping out of the CEO role at Geosyntec after 20 years but will remain chair of the company’s board, played a significant role in last year’s version of the course. Other instructors include Georgia Tech President Emeritus G. Wayne Clough and another new arrival, retired Gen. Philip Breedlove.

Breedlove, a career U.S. Air Force office and 1977 civil engineering graduate, just left his post as the supreme allied commander of NATO. He comes to Tech as a professor of the practice in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs.

Breedlove will lead some discussions in the Global Engineering Leadership and Management class and perhaps in other courses as well.

The third addition to the School’s faculty is John E. Taylor.

Taylor arrived in July as the first Frederick L. Olmsted Professor and will develop a course called Sustainable Cities that, like the leadership and management course, will be a component of the global engineering leadership minor.

Taylor has made his career studying the dynamics at the intersection of human and engineered networks, finding ways to model those dynamics and ultimately improve how the networks respond to systemic changes. He looks at five key areas: integrating rapid changes in information system technology, industry globalization, increasingly remote workforces, disaster resilience and mobility, and energy efficiency.

Taylor arrived from Virginia Tech, where he was a dean’s faculty fellow in the College of Engineering and a Preston and Catharine White fellow in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies.