Named inaugural Kohloss Chair in Mechanical Engineering

Jelena Srebric has been selected as the inaugural Margaret G. and Frederick H. Kohloss Chair in the University of Maryland’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

The endowed chair was established through a gift from Margaret and Frederick Kohloss (B.S. ’43). It recognizes a faculty member who has made significant contributions to their field and has also shown entrepreneurial effort and leadership in engineering beyond it, and it provides significant financial support for both research and education.

Srebric directs the Center for Sustainability in the Built Environment (City@UMD), which she helped establish with the mission of revolutionizing the physical infrastructure systems of cities. At the time of the appointment she supervised about $1.2 million a year in externally funded research, with a team of seven graduate and seven undergraduate students, a postdoctoral researcher and an associate research faculty member.

Her research advances multi-scale modeling of the built environment, providing reliable assessments of how buildings and infrastructure affect the people who use them, energy consumption and the associated carbon dioxide emissions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, her work turned to airborne infection risk in airplanes, buses and classrooms, and to the aerosols released by singers and musicians, and it was featured by national media from The New York Times to the Today Show.