Patrick (“Pat”) Kinnicutt received the S.B. degree in Civil Engineering in 1989 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During this time, he got involved in an undergraduate research project helping to develop the Engineering Geology Educator, a multimedia educational courseware built on top of the AthenaMuse 2 authoring platform. He received the S.M degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1991 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he continued work on the Engineering Geology Educator and developed a parser to decouple the content and the user interface. He received his Ph.D. in Information Technology in Civil Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995 in a collaborative project with the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI) and the Intelligent Engineering Systems Laboratory (IESL) developing a 3D geologic modeling application, NOMAD.
Dr. Kinnicutt worked as a senior software engineer for Schlumberger Technology Corporation between 1995 and 2003, where he worked on developing 3D geologic modeling software and real-time hydraulic fracture simulation and monitoring software.
He joined Central Michigan University (CMU) in 2003, initially with a joint appointment in Geology and Computer Science. He transitioned into a full-time position in the Department of Computer Science when he became the department chair, from 2014-2020. Dr. Kinnicutt currently is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at CMU, and performs research in brain-computer interfaces, scientific visualization and modeling, and machine learning. He is a faculty advisor for the department’s computer science, information technology, and cybersecurity programs, as well as for the interdisciplinary multimedia design, game design thinking and data engineering minors.