ECE Alum Named Romanian Minister of Education and Research

ECE alum Mihai Dimian (Ph.D. ’05) has been named the Minister of Education and Research of Romania. He was named to this position via a decree by President Nicușor Dan after being nominated by Prime Minister Illie Bolojan. As Minister of Education and Research, Dimian will oversee the continuing development and efficiency of Romania’s national educational system, which encompasses primary, secondary and higher education.

After earning undergraduate degrees in mathematics and physics, he received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from UMD in 2005. After graduating from UMD, he completed postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, followed by ten years as a professor in electrical engineering at Howard University in Washington D.C.

Prior to his new position as Minister of Education and Research, Diman was a professor at Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava in Romania, where he served as university rector since 2024.

As a researcher, he studied magnetization dynamics in nanoscale structures, stochastic aspects of hysteresis, and computational electromagnetics. His work has been published in a variety of prestigious journals, including Physical Review Journals, Journal of Applied Physics and IEEE Transactions on Magnetics.

“I was very fortunate to have Mihai as my PhD student, and I enjoyed very much working with him,” says Dimian’s former advisor Professor Isaak Mayergoyz. “He is a highly talented person with very broad scientific and cultural interests. He was deeply immersed in his research work, and his PhD dissertation was of very high quality. The results of his dissertation were further developed by him and Petru Andrei and published by Springer in the book “Noise-Driven Phenomena in Hysteretic Systems.” I am very proud of his accomplishments, and I believe that he will be very successful as the new Minister of Education and Research in Romania.

Published April 15, 2026