Susan C. Hagness was appointed Charles H. Phipps Dean of the Case School of Engineering at Case Western Reserve University in July 2026. In this role, she is responsible for driving the strategic vision of Case School of Engineering and working closely with other deans to advance broad collaborative research and educational initiatives across campus.
Background
Hagness received a BS with highest honors and a PhD in electrical engineering, both from Northwestern University. Prior to joining CWRU, she served on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 28 years, where she most recently held the titles of Philip D. Reed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Maria Stuchly Professor of Electrical Engineering. Leadership roles at UW-Madison included serving as chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2018 to 2026 and as the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Affairs in the College of Engineering from 2014 to 2017.
The impact of Hagness’ research, innovation, teaching, mentoring, and leadership have earned her many high honors. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2026 in recognition of her distinguished contributions to the engineering profession, specifically in computational electromagnetics and its biomedical applications. Hagness is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Among her numerous awards for research scholarship and impact are the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Early Career Achievement Award, the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) Issac Koga Gold Medal, the Impact Award from the US National Committee of URSI, and the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Achievement Award. A beloved educator and dedicated mentor, she has graduated 30 PhD students and has received numerous teaching recognitions including the IEEE Education Society Mac E. Van Valkenburg Early Career Teaching Award. She has completed two year-long leadership fellowships through the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (now the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and the ASU-Georgetown Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership.
Hagness and her students’ research has focused on establishing the physical basis and technological foundations for diagnostic and therapeutic innovations involving microwave-frequency electromagnetic wave interactions with human tissue. She was the technical lead for several large-scale studies of the dielectric properties of human tissue at microwave frequencies, including characterizing the dielectric properties of malignant and healthy breast tissue of varying breast density. Her research group developed mathematical models of breast tissue dielectric properties, tissue-mimicking materials, and high-fidelity breast phantoms used extensively in computational simulations and experimental laboratory studies of cancer detection and treatment techniques. She directed a leading medical microwave imaging research program for nearly three decades and more recently expanded her microwave imaging research into remote sensing technologies for agricultural applications. Her group has also advanced the field of microwave thermal and electric-pulse therapies. For example, she and her students and collaborators developed a miniature flexible antenna that can deliver microwave energy and ablate (destroy with heat) tumors in difficult-to-reach areas of the human body, as well as an electric-pulse approach to enhancing gene therapy delivery. Much of her work has been facilitated by the significant contributions she made early in her career to time-domain computational electromagnetics theory and applications.
Over her career, she has published over 115 peer-reviewed journal papers, and co-authored two editions of a highly cited textbook on computational electrodynamics. She is an inventor on 13 US patents.