USC Viterbi School of Engineering Dean Yannis Yortsos has announced the first holders of two new endowed positions: Joe Qin assumes the Fluor Professorship in Process Engineering, and Don Zhang takes on the Marshall Professorship in Engineering Technology.

The appointments – which were recommended by the appropriate faculty committee and approved by USC President Steven B. Sample – are in recognition of the duo’s exceptional distinction.

Qin joined USC this fall as a professor in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, with joint appointments in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering and the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the DuPont Young Professor Award, a Halliburton/Brown & Root Young Faculty Excellence Award, and a National Science Foundation-China Outstanding Young Investigator Award.

He has published extensively and holds a number of editorial positions.

Before joining USC, Qin was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in automatic control from Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Maryland.

Zhang, who joined the USC Viterbi School this year as a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, holds a joint appointment in the Mork Family Department.

Prior to his USC arrival, Zhang was a senior scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and held the Miller Chair at the Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. Zhang also has served as a Chang Jiang (guest chair) Professor at Nanjing University and was the founding associate dean at the College of Engineering of Peking University in China.

Zhang is an expert in the sequestration of carbon dioxide in geological formations as a viable option for mitigating greenhouse gas effects.

He currently serves as associate editor for Water Resources Research and the Journal of Computational Geosciences. He earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D., both in hydrology, from the University of Arizona.