Alan Mantooth, Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering, and Jia Di, professor of computer science and computer engineering, have been awarded endowed faculty chairs in the College of Engineering.

Mantooth has been named holder of a Twenty-First Century Research Leadership Chair, which is endowed at $2.05 million. Mantooth has been a member of the electrical engineering faculty since 1998, and he earned the highest level of research expenditures from grants on campus last year. He is director of the National Center for Reliable Electric Power Transmission, the NSF Industry/University Collaborative Research Center on Grid-Connected Advanced Power Electronic Systems, the NSF EPSCoR Vertically-Integrated Center on Transformative Energy Research and the NSF EPSCoR GREEN Research Center for Solar Cells. He also leads the campuswide effort to coordinate research in energy, the environment and the economy, known as 3E.

Jia Di will now hold a Twenty-First Century Research Leadership Chair, which includes a $1.5 million endowment. Di, who joined the College of Engineering in 2004, researches delay-insensitive asynchronous digital integrated circuit design. His work has drawn strong interest from a variety of government agencies and industry organizations. His projects include fundamental research supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, transferrable technologies funded by industry, and national security-related innovations supported by the Department of Defense.

"Dr. Mantooth and Dr. Di are nationally recognized members of the College of Engineering faculty," said John English, dean of engineering. "Retaining our most talented faculty members and providing them with the resources they need is an important part of educating Arkansans to be the next generation of engineering leaders."

These chairs were endowed by funds from the historic $300 million gift from the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation.