Amr Salah Elnashai, the head of the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will take over as Penn State’s new dean in the College of Engineering in January, Penn State announced today.

If approved by the Board of Trustees, Elnashai will follow David Wormley, who will retire at the end of this semester after serving as dean for more than 20 years.

The graduate of Cairo University and the Imperial College London is an internationally renowned scholar. His concentration of study focuses on earthquake research. At Illinois, he headed the National Science Foundation’s Mid-America Earthquake Center. Before arriving at Illinois, Elnashai was a professor of earthquake engineering at Imperial College in London.

In the private sector, Elnashai has worked with multinational corporations World Bank, Shell International, AstraZeneca, and served as an advisor to government-funded organizations throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

At Illinois, he supervises 69 faculty members, nearly fifteen hundred students, and a yearly budget nearing $40 million. During his tenure, he increased the size of the department by thirty percent.

“The breadth of his expertise and international reputation will further Penn State’s position at the forefront of engineering education,” said Penn State president Rodney Erickson. “Dr. Elnashai has worldwide connections that vastly increase the potential for collaboration with institutions of higher education, government entities and private industry, preparing our students for an increasingly global landscape.”