Hadas Kress-Gazit, the Geoffrey S.M. Hedrick Senior Endowed Professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has been named the next associate dean for diversity and academic affairs for Cornell Engineering. Her three-year term will begin on Sept. 1, 2024.

Kress-Gazit’s tenure will overlap with current senior associate dean for diversity and academic affairs José Martínez for four months before his term ends on Dec. 31, 2024. 

“This time together will allow for a smooth transition, which will be especially useful as José and Hadas partner recruit new leadership and define programming and goals for our Office of Inclusive Excellence,” said Lynden Archer, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering.

Kress-Gazit received her Ph.D. in electrical and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and has been at Cornell since 2009.

“In her time at Cornell, Hadas has emerged as a researcher of international renown in robotics. Hadas has been actively involved in diversity-enhancing efforts, cross-campus collaborations, as well as faculty mentoring, hiring and promotion,” Archer said. “In short, she is precisely the sort of person to lead our efforts to build a Cornell Engineering community based on inclusion and excellence.”

Kress-Gazit’s research focuses on formal methods for robotics and automation and more specifically on creating verifiable robot controllers for complex high-level tasks using logic, verification, synthesis, hybrid systems theory and computational linguistics. She received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2010, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award in 2012 and Cornell Engineering’s Fiona Ip Li '78 and Donald Li '75 Excellence in Teaching award in 2013.

“I am truly looking forward to her partnership with José in the coming months, and all that will come after it,” Archer said.