She has M.S. and Ph.D degrees from MIT. Not only is she latin but is also an incredibly intelligent woman.
This is great for UofT's re****tion as a world class institution, it's a coup to be able to attract top talent away from a prestigious engineering university like CMU. Good things happenning at UofT lately.
Woman named dean of U of T engineers Professor lured from Pittsburgh
Third key female posting in week Dec. 17, 2005. 10:37 AM LOUISE BROWN EDUCATION REPORTER
For the third time in one week, the University of Toronto has named a woman to lead one of its professional schools, with the appointment of engineering professor Cristina Amon as dean of applied science and engineering. But this time, the hiring is a cross-border raid from exclusive Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, not a promotion from within U of T ranks — as are new Law Dean Mayo Moran and new Dean of Medicine Dr. Catharine Whiteside. "Professor Amon is a gifted leader, a brilliant academic and committed teacher," university president David Naylor said about the 48-year-old mechanical engineer whose first hands-on project was taking the back off the family radio when she was 4 years old. "It was a big box radio and I thought there must be little people inside talking — I'm always very curious about how things work — so when my parents weren't looking I opened it up and found tubes instead of little people," Amon said. An American citizen who was born in Uruguay and schooled in Venezuela, Amon joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon in 1988 and for the past six years has served as director of the university's Institute for Complex Engineering Systems. Like Moran in law and Whiteside in medicine, Amon is the first female dean of her faculty, and arrives as engineering schools in Canada are battling a decline in female applicants. "Role models are important, and it's important for young women to see people in senior positions who have a life and have children," said the married mother of two university students, one of them a biomedical engineering major. "But overall we're seeing a slight decrease in the number of students going into engineering even in the United States, and I believe as engineers, we haven't conveyed the excitement an engineering career has to offer. "The fact we drive comfortable cars and can switch on a light at home — all that innovation comes from engineers." While Amon said she considers it her responsibility to motivate young people to consider engineering as a career, she could use a little help from the entertainment industry. "We have all these exciting TV shows about medicine, like ER, and forensics with the CSI shows, but why can't we have a show with the same energy and excitement about engineers?" she said. "Hollywood could be helping!" Amon, who loves to travel, believes students need to be more aware of the international scope of their profession and would encourage more student exchanges. At Carnegie Mellon, she served on a working group aimed at making the private school more welcoming to professors of different backgrounds, and said engineering is becoming increasingly global. "The United States produces 60,000 engineers a year and China produces 600,000. Students need more of a global perspective, because we will all be working increasingly with global partners." Amon begins her new job next July, succeeding Tas Venetsanopoulos, the current dean, and hopes to continue her own research one day a week into the tracking of aneurisms in people's arteries, to use scans and MRIs to predict when they might rupture and when surgery is needed. With her interest in biomedical research, Amon is thrilled to be coming to a university with a medical school, which Carnegie Mellon doesn't have. "Engineering is very practical. We design solutions to biomedical problems and medical problems. We're always looking for solutions."
