Leadership Team

Under the supervision of the Dean, the leadership at Tufts School of Engineering consists of Associate Deans and Directors, representing their respective areas of responsibility within the schools. These leaders work together as a team to promote and advance best practices of academic administration within the school.

Lee Coffin, Dean of Admissions
Lee Coffin has served as Tufts' Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Enrollment Management since 2003. Prior to Tufts he was Dean of Admission at Connecticut College from 1995 to 2001, where he also held concurrent appointments as Vice President for Enrollment (1998 to 2001) and Acting Vice President for Public Affairs (2000-01). Dean Coffin held the Millet Chair in Admissions at Milton Academy from 2001-03 and also served administrative appointments in Advancement at Trinity College and freshman advising at Harvard College. In addition to his work in admissions, Dean Coffin also serves as an adjunct lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he teaches a seminar entitled "Principles and Policy Issues of College Admissions." He earned a B.A. with honors in history from Trinity College and an Ed.M. in administration, planning and social policy from Harvard University.

Margery Davies, Director of Diversity Education & Development
Dr. Margery Davies is the Director of the Office of Diversity Education and Development (also known as the Diversity Office), which serves both the School of Engineering and the School of Arts and Sciences. This office is responsible for developing, implementing, and assessing a range of programs for faculty, staff, and students, and for collaborating with offices, departments, and programs in the School of Engineering, the School of Arts and Sciences, and other parts of the university, as appropriate, to promote diversity. Dr. Davies also serves as the Affirmative Action Officer for the School of Engineering and the School of Arts and Sciences, and in that capacity monitors all faculty searches and hires.

With a doctorate in sociology from Brandeis University, Dr. Davies has written about women, work, families, and child and family policy in the United States. Her book, Woman's Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers, 1870-1930 (Temple University Press, 1982), is an analysis of the feminization of clerical work in the United States.

With Professor Francine Jacobs of Tufts University, she edited More Than Kissing Babies? Current Child and Family Policy in the United States, (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994).

Lewis Edgers, Associate Dean
Lewis Edgers Lewis Edgers is an Associate Dean of Engineering at Tufts University, focused on curriculum development and graduate education. Dean Edgers chairs the Curriculum Task Force, established in 2004. The Curriculum Task Force works with the School of Engineering Curriculum Committee in guiding future curriculum revision and enhancement, consistent with school's aspirations to educate Tufts engineers as leaders and integrators in technological innovation. As Associate Dean for Graduate Education of the School of Engineering, he is responsible for the graduate programs in the School of Engineering, chairs the Engineering Graduate Studies Committee, and co-supervises (with Lynne Pepall, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences) the Office of Graduate Studies.

Dean Edgers also coordinates the school's processes for assessing and measuring the effectiveness of its programs. He works with the School’s Outcomes and Assessments Committee and the Tufts Office of Institutional Research to coordinate all assessment measures in the School of Engineering and to improve our processes of assessment, feedback, and continuous improvements.

Dean Edgers earned his B.S. in Civil Engineering at Tufts and his M.S. and Ph.D at MIT. He has published in a number of areas including: geohazards, landfill decomposition and settlement; global climate change effects; and on the effects of excavation induced ground movements on adjacent structures. Recently, his research has focused on renewable energy with a special emphasis on off-shore wind turbines. Dean Edgers is a registered professional engineer and is active in a number of professional societies. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Jim Glaser, Dean of Undergraduate Education
James Glaser is Dean of Undergraduate Education for Arts, Sciences, and Engineering and Professor of Political Science. He serves as the administration's point person on educational policy and curriculum, as a member of the leadership teams in the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering, and as the presiding officer of the U.S.S. (Undergraduate Education, Student Affairs, and Student Services) organization. A member of the President's 2003 Task Force on the Undergraduate Experience, Dean Glaser also takes responsibility for tracking the recommendations that flowed from this important initiative.

Dean Glaser received his B.A. from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley. He joined the Tufts faculty in 1991 and the administration in 2003. A student of electoral politics and political behavior, he is the author of two books. Both of them, The Hand of the Past in Contemporary Southern Politics (Yale University Press, 2005) and Race, Campaign Politics, and the Realignment in the South (Yale University Press, 1996), received the Southern Political Science Association's V.O Key Prize awarded to the year's best book on southern politics.

Robert J. Hannemann, Director of Tufts Gordon Institute
Rob Hannemann is the Director of the Tufts Gordon Institute. In this role, he is responsible for the Engineering Management and Entrepreneurial Leadership programs, which serve more than 100 graduate students and 400 undergraduates annually. He is also Professor of the Practice in the Mechanical Engineering department.

Dr. Hannemann earned advanced degrees in Mechanical Engineering from New York University (M.S.'72) and MIT (Sc.D.'75) after receiving his B.S. degree from Illinois Institute of Technology. He has experience as an engineer, manager, and entrepreneur. Prior to joining Tufts he co-founded an energy-efficient electronics cooling firm, Thermal Form & Function, Inc., where he is a director and management and technology advisor. Prior to joining the Tufts School of Engineering, he was a senior executive at Corning, Inc., Lasertron, and Digital Equipment Corporation. Earlier in his career, he was on the faculty at the University of Maryland at College Park.

G. Kim Knox, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education
Kim Knox has served as the School of Engineering undergraduate academic dean since 1994. In this role, Dean Knox is directly responsible for developing, implementing and assessing academic advising and the administration of the degrees awarded in 13 engineering disciplines. She serves as the School of Engineering's point person on educational policy. She is a member of the leadership team in the School of Engineering including Dean's Cabinet. Since 1988, she has been an adjunct professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, teaching Applied Mechanics - Statics, Dynamics, & Strength of Materials.

Dean Knox received her B.S. in Civil Engineering and her M.S. in structural engineering from Tufts and is a registered professional engineer. Prior to joining Tufts, she was the Chair of the Massachusetts Highway Department's Quality Leadership Council (1993-1994) which comprised the top decision makers for the Executive, Engineering Administration, and Finance branches. The Council provided policy level strategic vision and direction to the 3,000-person agency. She also served as a Senior Structural Engineer and Project Manager at Fay, Spofford and Thorndike (1980-1993). In this role, she was involved in design and investigation of over 100 bridges including steel, prestressed concrete, masonry and multiple-span curved girder bridge structures.

Eric Miller, Associate Dean for Research
Eric Miller, Associate Dean for Research, is a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department with an adjunct appointment in Computer Science. The School of Engineering Office of Research is responsible for creating a supportive environment to enhance research productivity and active scholarship. It initiates, supports and sustains programs and activities to increase faculty participation in research with an emphasis on collaborative and interdisciplinary efforts. The Office of Research is also responsible for working with the remainder of the Dean's Office to effectively communicate both internally and externally the many advances made by SOE faculty and students.

Professor Miller received the S.B. in 1990, the S.M. in 1992, and the Ph.D. degree in 1994 all in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Miller's research interests include physics-based tomographic image formation and object characterization, inverse problems, statistical signal and imaging processing, and computational physical modeling. With support from the NSF, NIH, DOE, DOD and corporate sponsors, this work has been carried out in the context of applications including medical imaging, nondestructive evaluation, environmental monitoring and remediation, landmine and unexploded ordnance remediation, and automatic target detection and classification. Dr. Miller is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Phi Beta Kappa and Eta Kappa Nu. He received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 1996 and the Outstanding Research Award from the College of Engineering at Northeastern University in 2002. He is currently serving as an Associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing and was in the same position at the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing from 1998-2002. Dr. Miller was the co-general chair of the 2008 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium held in Boston.

Scott G. Sahagian, Executive Associate Dean
Scott Sahagian is the first Executive Associate Dean for the School of Engineering and has been involved in developing all aspects of the administrative infrastructure for the school, directly supervising the areas of finance, space, information technology, and personnel. Prior to joining the School of Engineering, he was the Chief Administrative Officer of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University from January 2002 until March of 2005. He began at Brandeis in 1995 as the Associate Director of the Schneider Institute for Health Policy where his responsibilities included the management of the university's largest research unit. He was the Administrative Officer at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology from 1991 to 1995. Dean Sahagian worked in numerous positions in the YMCA, serving as Executive Director in several communities before working in academia.

He currently serves on several community and religious boards including the Center for Long Term Health and Aging and the Armenian Church at Hye Pointe. He has several published articles in the area of customer service and management. Dean Sahagian holds a B.S. from Salem State College and a M.B.A with a concentration in finance from Suffolk University.