Karen Thole has been named the new head of the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering at Penn State.
Thole was the William S. Cross professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech. Her research interests include heat transfer and fluid mechanics specializing in turbulent boundary layers, convective heat transfer, high freestream turbulence effects and gas turbine heat transfer.
During her career, she has attracted more than $5 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, U.S. Air Force, Pratt & Whitney, Modine Manufactuing and Siemens-Westinghouse. She has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and advised more than 35 graduate theses.
Thole is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the associate editor for ASME's Journal of Turbomachinery. She also is a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Thole chairs the Academic Advisory Board for the U.S. Department of Energy's University Turbine Systems Research Program.
Thole received the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award in 1996 and was inducted into the University of Texas at Austin Mechanical Engineering Distinguished Alumni Academy. She was a College of Engineering faculty fellow at Virginia Tech. She also was an AdvanceVT professor, which was funded by the National Science Foundation's Advance Program aimed at promoting women in academia.
Thole received her bachelor of science and master of science in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and her doctoral degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas-Austin.
After receiving her doctoral degree, she served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Thermal Turbomachinery at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany.
Thole became an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1994.
She joined the Virginia Tech faculty in 1999 and became a full professor in 2003. Thole also served as assistant department head of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech since 2004.