NPRE offers congratulations to alumnus James P. Holloway, who will become the new Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of New Mexico effective July 1, 2019.
Holloway is currently the Vice Provost for Global Engagement and Interdisciplinary Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan. In that position, Holloway has focused on ways in which the U-M engages the world through both scholarship and education, facilitating the creation of interdisciplinary activities that span from sustainability scholarship to engaged research in poverty alleviation. He has served as a Vice Provost since 2013, with a growing portfolio of responsibilities including global engagement, engaged learning and scholarship, and interdisciplinary academic affairs.
Holloway has served in a variety of leadership roles since joining the faculty at U-M as an assistant professor for Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences in January 1990. Additional roles have included the William Davidson Institute Board (2014 – present), Vice Provost for Global and Engaged Education (2013 – 2016), Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, College of Engineering, (2007 – 2013), and Interim Director, Wilson Student Team Project Center, College of Engineering, (2011).
In 2007, Holloway was named an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in recognition of outstanding contributions to undergraduate education. Later that year, he became associate dean for undergraduate education for the College of Engineering. Given the responsibility to blend the hemispheres of creativity and analysis within the engineering undergraduate experience, he dedicated himself to introducing students not only to the theory of engineering, but also to its practice, and to the world at-large.
Holloway’s research in the nuclear engineering field has focused on computational and mathematical modeling of neutral particle transport, plasma kinetics and hydrodynamics, and related problems in inverse problems and plasma tomography. Along with his students, he developed the first Riemann solvers for time dependent neutral particle transport, which included the first successful solutions of low-order nonlinear maximum entropy closures for transport equations.
He served as co-PI on the University of Michigan’s CRASH center, and led the center’s uncertainty quantification program. He has served as reviewer for many journals and programs, and served as Editor of the journal Transport Theory and Statistical Physics.
Holloway has also undertaken research in engineering education, including the study of student identity and gender in the engineering classroom. Holloway’s teaching has spanned from large first year classes to specialized graduate level courses. He has taught a course for education students on engineering in the high school classroom, and also taught a class on Engineering Across Cultures, not only in Ann Arbor but in Kumasi, Ghana, and Chiang Mai, Thailand.
He has received several awards during his academic career in addition to the Arthur F. Thurnau honor including: Ted Kennedy Family Team Excellence Award (Production of an extraordinary and significant piece of work from current or recent collaboration to the College of Engineering in teaching or research – awarded for the work of the CRASH Center in 2014); Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award (2011); Committee on Institutional Cooperation Academic Leadership Program Fellow (CIC-ALP Fellow) in 2005; and the Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences Alpha Nu Sigma Faculty Teaching Award (awarded by vote of the students of the department) and the Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences Outstanding Achievement Award, both in 2004.
Holloway earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in NPRE in 1982 and 1984, respectively. In 1989, he was awarded a doctorate in Engineering Physics at the University of Virginia, where he was subsequently Research Assistant Professor of Engineering Physics and Applied Mathematics.