Farrington engineers at SEAS

An expert in material science, Farrington has been at Penn for nearly two decades, all of it with Engineering. Farrington has overseen major changes to the school over the last year including the hiring of the school's first African-American faculty members and the establishment of a new major in Computer and Engineering and a dual degree program with the Annenberg School for Communication and the Graduate School of Fine Arts in Digital Media Design. In November, the opening of the Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories of the Institute of Advanced Science and Technology, provided the end to another of Farrington's long-term projects, the creation of state-of-the-art-lab space for Chemical Engineering. Farrington received his bachelor's degree from Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., and his doctorate in engineering from Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. He taught material science at Penn and chaired the department until his appointment as director of Penn's Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter in 1987. The school currently has 1,500 undergraduate students, in addition to about 500 graduate and doctoral students.