Professor
Mechanical Engineering
Senior Vice President and Provost

Jonathan Wickert serves as Senior Vice President and Provost at Iowa State University, overseeing all of the university’s academic programs. With its first degree conferred in 1872, ISU today is a premier land grant university and strives to be a model for value and commitment to the missions of education, research, and extension.

Dr. Wickert’s research addresses vibration and noise control problems in high-speed, precision machinery. He is the author of over one hundred technical papers, holds two patents, and has served as a consultant to the computer, automotive, aerospace, and materials industries. Dr. Wickert is the author of the textbook An Introduction to Mechanical Engineering, which has been translated into the Korean, Chinese, and Portuguese languages.

As Senior Vice President and Provost, Dr. Wickert emphasizes student success, educational opportunities that prepare students to make a difference in the world, and public-private partnerships. He also teaches in the classroom every semester.

Dr. Wickert is active professionally with the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, the Iowa Business Council, and national higher education organizations. He has received awards from the Society of Automotive Engineers, the American Society for Engineering Education, the Information Storage Industry Consortium, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He earned B.S., M.S, and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley; was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK; and was a visiting professor at the Helsinki University of Technology. He has served Iowa State University as Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and as Dean of Engineering, and previously Carnegie Mellon University as a member of the engineering faculty.

• PhD, Mechanical Engineering, University of California-Berkeley, 1989
• MS, Mechanical Engineering, University of California-Berkeley, 1987
• BS, Mechanical Engineering, University of California-Berkeley, 1985

• Mechanical vibration and noise control
• Continuous and multibody systems dynamics
• Applied mechanics
• Applications in computer data storage, flexible web material manufacturing, and friction-vibration interaction