Michael R. Lovell was hired as Dean of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in August of 2008. He previously served as the Associate Dean for Research in the School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh where he held appointments in the industrial, mechanical and bioengineering departments. During his tenure in Pittsburgh, Lovell served as the Executive Director of the Swanson Center for Product Innovation where he spent eight years mentoring more than 200 project teams through the product realization process. Receiving several grants from the National Science Foundation, Lovell was able to perform in-depth research on the product development teams he mentored. Based on this research, Lovell developed unique methodologies that increased the likelihood of a team creating an innovative product from 50-80 percent. Utilizing his methodology, Lovell mentored student teams that developed 224 new products and formed eight companies over a four-year period.

In addition to running the Center for Product Innovation at Pittsburgh, Lovell was the director of the National Science Foundation Center for e-Design and was the site director of the Department of Energy Institute for Advanced Energy Studies. Among his accomplishments, Professor Lovell is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award (1997), the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award (1999), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Burt L. Newkirk Award in Tribology (2005), the inaugural Olympus Emerging Academic Innovator Award (2006) and was named a fellow of ASME (2008). He is presently launching an Institute for Industrial Innovation at UWM.