Edward Snell, professor in the Department of Materials Design and Innovation, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has been named department chair, effective Jan. 1. 

Snell succeeds Krishna Rajan, who has served as the department’s inaugural chair since 2015. Rajan, SUNY Distinguished Professor and SUNY Empire Innovation Professor, will return to a faculty role.

“I look forward to the continued growth of the Department of Materials Design and Innovation under Professor Snell’s leadership,” said Kemper Lewis, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “He brings both an unwavering commitment to excellence and a bold vision that will drive the department forward.”

Snell is an internationally recognized biophysicist whose research focuses on X-ray interactions with materials, particularly in the biological sciences. His projects span improving high-throughput crystallization methods, accurately interpreting metalloprotein structures and exploring electron transport in biological systems.

He served as CEO and president of Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute for nearly a decade and continued as its chief scientific officer until the institute’s merger with UB in January 2025.

He was the director of BioXFEL, a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center that secured more than $47 million in funding to advance the biological applications of X-ray free-electron lasers. Under his leadership, the center produced nearly 1,000 publications and deposited more than 1,350 structural models in the Protein Data Bank.

Snell is a fellow of the American Crystallographic Association, and he was named to Buffalo Business First’s Power 250 list of Western New York’s most influential people from 2015 to 2024. Prior to joining UB, he was a staff scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center Biophysics Laboratory, where he conducted experiments that were flown on the space shuttle, Mir, and the International Space Station.