Professor Ethan Ritz joins the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering as an Assistant Professor, teaching stream as of September 1, 2026. He will teach CIV100-Mechanics and MIE404-Control Systems this year.
CivMin spoke with Professor Ritz to learn more about his research direction, passion for teaching and what attracted him to Toronto. He has relocated from California to join our department.
“We wholeheartedly welcome our newest faculty member to the department,” says CivMin Chair Prof. Marianne Hatzopoulou offering her greetings. “Students will benefit from the exciting new elements Professor Ritz brings to the Department particularly his novel approaches to teaching and engineering education. Join us in offering our newest professor a warm welcome to CivMin.”
Please tell us a little about yourself as an introduction.
I was born in Connecticut, U.S., where my dad was a civil engineer working for the Metro North commuter railway in New York City. I then went to Harvey Mudd College in California for a bachelor’s degree in general engineering, then to Cornell University in New York for my PhD in Mechanical Engineering. I first worked in a robotics lab at Cornell, but quickly moved into materials engineering.
My PhD work with Nicole Benedek focused on using density functional theory (DFT) to understand the chemical origins of negative thermal expansion and elastic anisotropy in perovskite oxides. This is also where I met my wife, Vera Khovanskaya, who is now an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information here at U of T, and where our son Basil was born. I was then a postdoc in the department of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science at the University of Minnesota under Turan Birol, where I combined DFT with group theory to better understand the relationship between superconductivity and pressure in kagome metals. From there, I went back to Harvey Mudd in 2023 – which I never would have expected when I first graduated from there – to join the Engineering department as an Assistant Professor, where I taught classes in solid mechanics, system dynamics, vibrations, and engineering mathematics.
Could you explain the focus of your research?
My research uses computational tools like density functional theory and molecular dynamics (MD) as well as symmetry and group theory to probe both macroscale properties of materials such as elasticity, phase behaviour, ferroelectricity, superconductivity, and magnetism through atomistic scale simulations. While much of my previous work has focused on highly ordered systems such as perovskites and kagome metals, I have recently started exploring high-entropy alloys for catalysis as well as triglyceride solidification. If crystal symmetry is being created or broken, I’m interested! My current projects involve using machine learning and DFT to find new altermagnets (a newly discovered type of magnetic ordering with impact in spintronics), using MD and DFT to explore how the phase transition properties in alternative cements respond to changes in composition, understanding how flexoelectric energy harvesting is influenced by crystal structure, and optimizing high-entropy alloys for hydrogen evolution catalysis. If your research could benefit from atomic scale predictions, I’d love to collaborate!
Why did you choose U of T?
I have enjoyed the Toronto area for many years, as my wife has family in the area. She joined the U of T Faculty of Information in 2024, so I have had even more frequent visits since then. The metro system is amazing, and there is a ton of public space to explore by foot or bike. As for U of T itself, there is so much going on here. There are so many people to talk to and collaborate with and so many ideas flying around, there’s a really spectacular dynamism. The high-performance computing access is top-notch, and everyone I’ve talked to has been so welcoming. Additionally, the financial cost to attend U of T is far more accessible than many private institutions, meaning that it’s a strong path for social mobility. It feels good to be a part of that.
What are you most looking forward to in your new position?
I’m most interested in the scale of it all. Harvey Mudd had about 900 students total, all undergraduate. CIV100 itself is bigger than that all by itself! I also love team teaching and am happy I get to keep doing that. I’m also excited to be teaching controls in MIE as well – two departments worth of people to meet!
As a new professor, what one piece of advice would you give to new students?
Keep in mind that you’re going to learn your whole life. It’s easy to be worried about whether you’re taking enough classes, whether you’re going to pack all of the experiences you want in just a few years here. But, if you believe it or not, what you’re learning here will actually end up being a very small portion of all the things you will learn in your life. I tried to take so many classes and fill my schedule to the last minute, but time to step back, to think about things and pursue projects in an unstructured way is also important for learning. Any one of the things that you learn about, any one class you take, you can think about nearly infinitely deeply. Understand that what you’re really doing is setting yourself up for all of your lifelong learning.
What do you hope to accomplish in your new position/during your time at U of T Engineering?
One thing I’d like to do is teach a big breadth of classes and learn how the whole curriculum fits together. Harvey Mudd was very small and we only had about twenty engineering faculty, and we needed to cover every kind of engineering. So you naturally end up teaching all over the map, pushing yourself to learn new things and make new connections. I’d like to keep doing that here as much as I can, to really learn as much I can about the curriculum and the big-picture experience students get. I also hope to participate in a few big research collaborations – again, there is just so much here, in terms of equipment and personnel, at a level I haven’t really experienced as a professor before. Working with graduate students as a professor would be a new mentorship experience; it would be interesting to see how it was similar and different to the undergraduate mentorship I’ve done at Harvey Mudd.
What is the most memorable experience in your career so far?
Seeing my undergraduate research students present at a conference this past spring (the American Physical Society Global Summit). I remembered taking them both on as second year students, and to see how far they had grown, how much they had learned, and how much they had done over two years was really awesome.
Finally, is there anything fun/unusual/unexpected about yourself you’d like to share with our CivMin audience?
I taught college classes in prisons for five semesters during my PhD and postdoc through prison education programs in New York and Minnesota. The incarceration rate in the states is about five times higher than Canada, meaning there are many more prisons and many more incarcerated people. I believe everyone has a right to learn, including people in prison. I personally learned so much about how prisons work and the people inside of them, and I think it made me a better teacher, too. It was a formative experience and a big part of what made me prioritize education in my own career.