Education
McMahan received undergraduate degrees in Physics and the History of Art from Duke University in 1982 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Physics from Dartmouth in 1986 under Gary Wegner.
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Robert McMahan
Edit Profileacademic administrator professor of physics
Career
He is the seventh and current president of Kettering University. McMahan assumed the position of President on August 1, 2011, succeeding Stanley R. Liberty. Academic
After a postdoctoral appointment at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics under Margaret Geller (1986-1989), and while also engaged in a number of corporate and public sector roles (see Corporate and Public below), he served as a research professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1989-2008.
He joined Western Carolina University in 2008 as the founding dean of the Kimmel School and Professor of Engineering prior to becoming the seventh president of Kettering University in 2011, where he also holds an appointment as a tenured Professor of Physics.
McMahan is known for computational modeling and observational work in white dwarf stars early in his career, then later for work in cosmology and extragalactic astronomy. As a graduate student he was involved with the Seven Samurai research group that postulated the existence of the Great Attractor.
As a postdoc at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics under Margaret Geller he participated in research that resulted in the development of maps of the large-scale structure of the universe, which led to the discovery of the Great Wall. At the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics he developed 3d visualization software that was used in the 40-minute film, So Many Galaxies..So Little Time, which was on display at the National Air and Space Museum.
He has co-authored and authored over 50 articles in astronomy and astrophysics, engineering and public policy and holds five United States patents.
Corporate and public
While at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, McMahan founded McMahan Research Laboratories, an applied physics systems research and development firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1988, which relocated to the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina in 1989 and was later was acquired in 2000 by Gretag-Macbeth. He then joined In-Q-Tel, a private venture capital organization funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, and afterward served as the Senior Advisor to the Governor of North Carolina for Science and Technology, and the Executive Director of the North Carolina Board of Science and Technology from 2003-2008 where he led the development of significant state and national innovation, investment capital, and technology based economic development policies and legislation, and was a frequent international speaker on academic entrepreneurship and on the role of universities in economic development. McMahan has been married to the former Karen Deschamps, a graduate of McGill University, since 1989.
They have two children.
Membership
He was a member of the EFAR project, a detailed study of the peculiar velocity distribution of a large number elliptical-rich galaxy clusters.
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Born
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Nationality
United States