Devesh Ranjan named dean of UW College of Engineering

Devesh Ranjan, a mechanical engineer and a leader at one of the country’s largest and highest-ranked engineering programs, will be the 10th dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

“We are very fortunate to bring an engineer with Prof. 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.”

Ranjan, now the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, remembers the promise he felt when 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.

“I’ve been blessed from that day onward,” Ranjan says. “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.”

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, where his work has focused on the dynamics of fluids at very high speeds — air across the surface of supersonic jets, the plume of a volcanic eruption, shock waves that fragment kidney stones — and designing next-generation power cycles optimized for solar energy sources or incorporating the efficiency of supercritical carbon dioxide as in heat pumps.

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 U.S. 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.

In January 2022, he became school chair of Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, the campus’s largest school, with nearly 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students and 95 faculty spread across 19 buildings. Under the pall cast by the COVID-19 pandemic, Ranjan says, there was a distance — more than physical — growing between the members of the school’s community. He set out to close that gap with several community-building initiatives, including Olympic-style games that were so popular, they quickly grew to include faculty and staff members beyond the school.

People, first and foremost, are the strength of an institution like UW–Madison’s College of Engineering, according to Ranjan. Investing in them and supporting their culture is the route to success.

“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.”

Planning is underway for the new Phillip A. Levy Engineering Center, a 395,000-square-foot centerpiece for UW–Madison’s engineering campus.

Ranjan expects to begin work in Madison this summer, picking up the job from Grainger Dean of the College of Engineering Ian Robertson, who will continue as a faculty member in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

“Ian has really set the college up for success,” Ranjan says. “It’s the right time, right place, and with the right ideas, we can really make UW the most impactful undergraduate and graduate program in engineering in the country.”

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.

It’s a vision he expects to enhance, with support and opportunity for students and room for entrepreneurial growth and by leveraging more of the college’s assets for the benefit of the state and beyond. Talented grads from UW–Madison’s College of Engineering should be so sought-after that they draw established and start-up companies to set up shop in Wisconsin, he says.

“I want to know how many of our people are now in CEO and CTO suites in the state of Wisconsin,” Ranjan says. “I’d love to meet those people, to understand how can we enhance our value proposition for the state.”

He would also like to take advantage of his Madison homecoming — with his wife, Dr. Kumuda Ranjan, a family physician, and sons Ailesh and Aayush Ranjan, ages 9 and 8 — to learn to ice skate with his kids. In his native India, where temperatures could push 120 degrees, hockey was something he played on grass. Adapting and flourishing has been Ranjan’s plan since he landed in Wisconsin.

“My first winter there was, you know, adaptation to a different life. Survival was a skill set I learned in my first winter,” Ranjan says. “My second winter I was in shorts in January. I learned a lot about myself in Madison.”

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. In addition to traditional research-based graduate programs, it offers 13 undergraduate majors and a portfolio of online and in-person professional education programs that serve thousands of learners annually.