An interview with Dr. Hajj

Dr. Muhammad Hajj is so passionate about the fields he oversees that he tried to convince The Stute reporter to change his major from Mechanical Engineering to Ocean Engineering at the end of the interview.

Dr. Hajj was hired this past summer to be the new Chair of the Department of Civil, Environmental & Ocean Engineering (CEOE) and Director of Davidson Laboratory, replacing both Interim Chair Linda M. Thomas and Alan Blumberg, the previous Director of Davidson Lab. He comes from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, where he was the Associate Dean of the Graduate School and Director of the Center for Energy Harvesting Materials and Systems. When asked about why he chose to come to Stevens, he said, “[Stevens] is a good place. There is an opportunity to be a part of the world-renowned Davidson Lab; there is very great research going on in the fields of Coastal Engineering, Environmental Engineering, and Ocean Engineering. So, it’s a good program, I’m glad to be a part of it, and I’ll try to lead it into a new place.”

He found it amusing when he was asked why the positions of Davidson Lab Director and CEOE Department Chair were consolidated into one person since he was being asked about someone else’s decisions. Regardless, he said it allows him to achieve more at once, completing research while also tackling administrative responsibilities. Furthermore, he said it keeps the department tightly connected, enhancing both the department itself and the education it provides.

Our discussion about the department’s future started out with praise for its existing achievements, with Dr. Hajj specifically mentioning the fact that 100% of undergraduates receive jobs or job offers prior to graduation. With this in mind, he said his first goal is to make sure CEOE students continue to have the same amount of opportunities. The solution, in his words, “is to have a more rigorous education that is also more flexible at the same time.” His second goal is to prepare the department for the future of artificial intelligence and the threat of cyber attacks at the same time. Currently, the department relies heavily on the use of mathematical models due to the nature of its work, and large amounts of time are spent augmenting and improving those models by hand. In the future, however, he wants to use artificial intelligence to improve physical models by processing volumes of data outside of the scope of human researchers.

Wrapped up in implementing artificial intelligence are myriad concerns about cyber security, and when Dr. Hajj said, “We are looking at designing buildings with a lot of connectivity, structures with connectivity, wastewater treatment plants with a lot of connectivity, and ships with a lot of connectivity,” it immediately became clear how grounded those concerns are. While cybersecurity is obviously more at home in the Computer Science Department, Hajj said it will be important to educate CEOE majors in how it works going forward. That way they can at least understand the basics and collaborate more efficiently with hacking experts.