Dr. Peter E. Raad
Executive Director
The Guildhall at SMU
Dr. Peter E. Raad is the founding Director of the Linda and Mitch Hart eCenter at SMU, a university-wide center established in 2000 to stimulate, facilitate, and support innovative multi-disciplinary activities that enable the creative and responsible development and use of interactive network technologies. Under his leadership, the Hart eCenter incubated in 2002 The Guildhall at SMU, a novel industry-university collaborative graduate educational program designed to educate and train future practitioners and innovators in the fast-growing field of digital game development. In six short years, the program has graduated over 330 students and alumni have worked at more than 80 video game studios around North America.
Prior to becoming the founding director of the Hart eCenter and Executive Director of the Guildhall, Dr. Raad served as the Associate Dean of the SMU School of Engineering, in charge of all academic affairs, research and graduate studies, and computer operations. Between 1990 through 1993, he held the first J. Lindsay Embrey Trustee Professorship in Engineering, an endowed chair for an outstanding junior faculty member.
Dr. Raad has published more than40 articles and over 100 conference papers. He holds US and international patents in thermal metrology and computational characterization of multi-scale integrated circuits. He has received over $2.5M in funding from government and industry in support of his extensive research in tsunami mitigation and solid-fluid wave interactions, as well as his founding in 1995 of an industry-university collaborative laboratory dedicated to the computational modeling and laser-based measurement of submicron electronic devices.
Dr. Raad’s current research interests include the application of interactive media in education, with an emphasis on simulation-based decision making in multi-disciplinary complex systems.
He received a BSME, MS, and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. In 1986, he joined the mechanical engineering department at SMU as an Assistant Professor and is currently a Full Professor.
