Marco Saraniti. Photographer: Natalie Pierce/ASU
Electrical engineering Professor Marco Saraniti has been appointed one of three new vice deans of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. In this role he looks forward to helping advance the schools’ programs, faculty and student initiatives.
As a result of the the school’s growth, Dean Kyle Squires has restructured the Fulton Schools’ administration to match that size and the new organizational needs it brings. The three vice deans will help manage day-to-day needs as well as advance strategic initiatives.
“The new administrative structure devised by Dean Squires strongly promotes interactions and exchange of ideas between the directors, the vice deans and the dean,” Saraniti says. “This non-hierarchical, strongly collaborative environment impressed me when Kyle described it.”
Saraniti has been a professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering for the past eight and a half years.
ECEE Director and electrical engineering Professor Stephen Phillips supports Saraniti’s appointment and the new structure of the Fulton Schools’ administration.
“Marco has been a consistent innovator in ECEE programs,” Phillips says. “He was instrumental in the development of the online delivery of our undergraduate electrical engineering degree, which was the first undergraduate engineering program available fully online to be accredited by ABET. In his new role he has the opportunity to elevate the profile of not only ECEE, but all of the Fulton Schools.”
Saraniti and Phillips’ work on web-based knowledge delivery has led to about half of the undergraduate enrollment in ECEE incorporating online delivery to remote and resident students.
As vice dean, Saraniti is looking forward to having an extended role in working with the Fulton Schools’ world-class faculty and having an extended role to try new ideas with his colleagues.
“The Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, and ASU in general, is the right place to be if one wants to try new ideas and practices of university administration,” Saraniti says. “Here things happen quickly and new ideas, no matter how apparently unorthodox, are constantly tried ‘on the field.’ I’m honored to be working with a world-class faculty having an unusually broad range of research and educational interests.”
Saraniti’s expertise is in computational electronics and biophysics. His recent scientific work is centered on the development of Monte Carlo and cellular automaton techniques for 2D and 3D simulation of semiconductor devices, simulation and engineering of semiconductor devices, and the development of numerical methods for the modeling and simulation of membrane proteins.
He has authored or co-authored more than 90 publications, four book chapters and four technical reports.
Saraniti holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from University of Modena in Italy and a doctorate in physics from Technische Universität München in Germany.
After earning his doctorate, Saraniti came to ASU as a faculty research associate in the electrical engineering department. Then, from 1998 to 2007, he worked at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago before returning to the Fulton Schools as a professor in August 2007.
