Cockrell School Gets New Department Leaders
Charles Werth will chair the Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, and Jennifer Maynard leads the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering.
The Cockrell School of Engineering welcomed two new department chairs to lead top 10 programs in civil, architectural and environmental engineering and chemical engineering into the future.
Jennifer Maynard is a key figure in the biologics field, working on therapeutics for a range of illnesses. She began her term in May. Werth is a leading expert in protecting groundwater from pollutants, and he begins his term in August.
Department chairs set the culture for students, staff and faculty, steering priorities and key initiatives.
Charles Werth, Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Werth holds the Bettie Margaret Smith Chair of Environmental Health Engineering, and he has been with the department for 12 years. He is an expert in pollutants and their removal from vital groundwater and drinking water sources.
For the last few years, Werth has split his time between UT and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a division of the U.S. Department of Energy. As a program director there, he focused primarily on advancing new energy-relevant technologies in the water treatment space.
He led the RECOVER program, which allocated $40 million to 14 projects focused on developing new technologies to recover commercially relevant forms of critical minerals and ammonia from various wastewater sources, including produced water, mine tailings effluent and municipal wastewater.
Werth succeeds Bob Gilbert, who led the department for eight years, including the 2023 naming for Fariborz Maseeh and the beginning of a years-long effort to reimagine how civil, architectural and environmental engineering will be taught to future generations of students.
Jennifer Maynard, McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering
An expert in antibody therapeutics, Maynard holds both the Z.D. Bonner Professorship and is the Claire and Peter Buenz Endowed Chair in Chemical Engineering. She has been with UT since 2007.
Maynard leads the CPRIT-funded Advanced Protein Therapeutics core, which aims to help cancer researchers in Texas evaluate novel treatment approaches, and the UT Austin/ MD Anderson TRIUMPH-IBC effort, which aims to develop new treatments for inflammatory breast cancer. She also serves on the executive committee of UT Austin’s translational interdisciplinary research center Texas Biologics. It focuses on the discovery, early development and clinical translation of biologic therapies in multiple disease areas and aims to grow the therapeutics ecosystem at UT.
Maynard succeeds David Allen, a world-renowned expert in urban air quality and sustainable systems who served as interim chair of the department in 2025-2026.