Winter Term Brings Two New Faculty Members

Two new faculty members joined the College of Engineering with the beginning of the winter term.

Megan Creighton, PhD, joins the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering as assistant professor. Prior to joining Drexel in the winter of 2021, Creighton was jointly appointed as a research scientist in the mechanical engineering department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as an Air Force Science and Technology Fellow in the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. Dr. Creighton also spent several years as a Senior Research Engineer in the 3M Corporate Research Materials Laboratory in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she served as the company's subject matter expert in carbon materials and worked on technology development in support of all five of the company's business groups. She received her PhD in chemical and environmental engineering from Brown University from the lab of Professor Robert Hurt and her BS in chemical engineering from the University of New Hampshire. At Drexel, Creighton's research efforts will focus on nanomaterial colloids and surface science.

“The realization of the potential societal benefits of new technologies depends on their ability to be scaled and manufactured,” says Creighton. “My interests lie in both developing fundamental understanding of these systems and balancing that with practical impact on the safe and sustainable development of advanced materials and devices.”

Yong-Jie Hu, PhD, joins the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as assistant professor. He received his BE degree from Tsinghua University and MS degree from Tohoku University. In 2016, he obtained his PhD degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. Before joining Drexel, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Pennsylvania State University and subsequently at the University of Michigan. His research interests are in computational materials science, with an emphasis on modeling of mechanical, thermodynamic, and electronic properties of materials for structural and functional applications. Through integrating multiscale simulations and machine learning, his research at Drexel will aim to develop new theories, approaches, and databases to build more quantitative insights into the composition-structure-property relationships for the design and manufacturing of new materials.

“I am very honored and excited to be a part of Drexel!” says Hu. “By working with our outstanding students and colleagues, I look forward to leveraging my expertise in computational materials science to continuously develop creative, collaborative, and diversified teaching and research activities in the future.”