Associate Dean Cammy Abernathy will start as UF's ninth dean of engineering on July 17, Provost Joe Glover announced Monday.

 

Before her years at Stanford and MIT, before she worked at the cutting edge of innovation at Bell Laboratories, and decades before she was named the first female dean of UF’s College of Engineering, Cammy Abernathy was a curious 5-year-old at a neighborhood barbecue who wanted to know why the smoke from the grill was black. 

Luckily, the man flipping burgers was a chemical engineer.

“He explained about the elements in the smoke,” she recalled. “I remember thinking, ‘Engineers know all kinds of interesting things.’”

Abernathy, who came to UF as a materials science and engineering professor in 1993, takes the helm on July 17, replacing outgoing dean Pramod Khargonekar just as the College marks its 100th anniversary. 

“I would have been happy working for Pramod for the next ten years. He was a great leader for the College and a true mentor, for which I am very thankful,” said Abernathy, who became associate dean for academic affairs in 2004. “But I thought about the initiatives that Pramod and I had started that I wanted to take further, and I thought my experience could help the college move forward in some unique ways.” 

One of those initiatives is an increased focus on interdisciplinary research, a skill the Texas native honed in graduate school at Stanford and in her years at AT&T’s Bell Labs, where she collaborated on the development of a semiconductor device used in millions of cellular phones worldwide. 

Abernathy began working at Bell Labs in the summer of her junior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With encouragement from her Bell Labs mentor and supervisor, Dexter Johnston, Jr., she went on to graduate school, earning a master’s and doctorate in materials science and engineering from Stanford University. 

After graduating in 1985, she returned to Bell Labs, eager to work in the industry. Despite her childhood nickname, “The Professor” (given more for her wire-rimmed glasses than her career goals) Abernathy didn’t see herself returning to a university setting. 

“I thought I would never darken the door of academia again,” she said. “But as I got older, I realized that academia offered more flexibility to work on the research I really wanted to do. Projects come and go in the marketplace. If you want to really sink your teeth into one particular area, academia gives you more stability and freedom for those intellectual pursuits.”

Abernathy thrived in the academic community. She is an author of more than 500 papers in science and engineering journals, she was named a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society in 2000, an AVS Distinguished Lecturer in 2001, and a Fellow of the AVS in 2002, holding UF’s Alumni Chair in Materials Science and Engineering from 2001 to 2004.

When Khargonekar encouraged Abernathy to consider administration, she saw an opportunity to create a collegiate experience that was better than her own.

“I wanted to make sure the generation of female students following after me had a different experience than I did,” she said, likening her college years in male-dominated engineering departments to being “in a men’s locker room.” 

During her time at Stanford, Abernathy says there was just one female engineering professor in the college, and she wasn’t in Abernathy’s department. While faculty and student diversity have improved since the 1980s, Abernathy wants to ensure that growth continues. 

“We need a more diverse student body, and to do that we need a more diverse faculty,” she says. “For our university and for our profession, we need to tap into pools we haven’t traditionally drawn from well: women and minorities.”

The naming of a female dean is a milestone that puts UF in the company of universities like Purdue. And while increasing diversity is one of Abernathy’s core goals, she also hopes to boost retention among freshman engineering students across the board.

“Students today want to be challenged to solve important problems,” she said. “Instead of saying, ‘Come and be an engineer,’ we need to be saying, ‘Come and help us solve issues in health care and energy, help improve the water supply for underdeveloped nations.’ We need to market ourselves that way and provide an academic climate that educates them that way.”

The interdisciplinary approach Abernathy hopes to bring to the College’s research extends to its curriculum, as well. As an example, she cites an experimental-design class she’s teaching this summer, where engineering freshmen are paired with fine-arts majors to create a consumer product that can sense an air or water pollutant. 

“We’re showing them early on the importance of interdisciplinary team building and how fun engineering design can be. The idea is to show them that even as freshmen, they can address important problems.”

As dean, Abernathy also hopes to boost outreach to middle and high school students and offer more leadership-development opportunities to graduate and undergraduate engineering students. She also hopes to continue attracting world-class professors to the College.

“We need to encourage more of our own best students to become engineering faculty,” she said.

Amidst all this, Abernathy says she’ll find time to keep up the fantasy baseball league she oversees with her 10-year-old son, Max, and to cheer on the Gator athletic teams with Max and her husband, Steve Pearton, a distinguished professor of materials science and engineering at UF.   

“My family has tickets to just about every Gator sports event, from women’s volleyball to men’s baseball,” she said.

On Monday, the day her promotion was announced, her phone rang off the hook and her inbox was overflowing, but Abernathy kept her focus squarely on academics.

“I pretty much ignored it all,” she says. “I had a class to teach.”

She’ll bring that same focus to leading the College, where, based on conversations she’s had with President Bernie Machen and Provost Joe Glover, “we have a great future ahead of us,” she said. 

“After all of the gloom and doom of budget cuts this year, I think we’re ready to put that behind us and focus on where we’re headed.”