By Beth Miller
Twelve new faculty members will join the School of Engineering & Applied Science between July 1, 2014 and July 1, 2015, bringing the total faculty number to 92, the most in the history of the school. The new hires put the school on track to reach 100 faculty members by 2020.
Eight new faculty members will begin this fall, while two will join Jan. 1, 2015, and two will join July 1, 2015. Each of the five departments in the school will gain at least one new faculty member.
“I am extremely pleased to welcome this tremendously gifted group of faculty to our Engineering family,” says Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, dean and the Spencer T. Olin Professor. “I have never seen so many highly qualified applicants for all of our positions. Among the 12 new faculty, in all five of our departments, I am especially thrilled that three are alumni from our school; two undergraduates and one Ph.D. Since I became Dean four years ago, we have hired approximately one-third of the present members of the faculty, including about 20 assistant professors. All will be outstanding additions to our main research and teaching focus areas of the environment, health, security and entrepreneurism.”
The new faculty are:
Biomedical Engineering
Steven George, MD, PhD, professor and chair, begins July 1, 2014.
About: George is professor of biomedical engineering and of chemical engineering & materials science at the University of California, Irvine. In addition, he is the Edwards Lifesciences Professor and director of the Edwards Lifesciences Center for Advanced Cardiovascular Technology. Previously, he was the founding William J. Link Professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC-Irvine from 2002-09. George will be installed as the Elvera and William Stuckenberg Professor of Technology and Human Affairs this fall.
Education: George earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Northwestern University and a medical degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He earned a doctorate in chemical engineering and completed postdoctoral fellowships in physiology, all at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Research: George’s research interests include tissue engineering with particular interest in creating microphysiological systems, vascularizing engineered tissues, and linking optical and mechanical properties of tissue. He has four active grants from the National Institutes of Health, including his role as principal investigator on a T32 training grant in cardiovascular technology and entrepreneurship. With a group of collaborators, he received one of only 12 grants from the NIH to create 3-D chips with living cells and tissues that accurately model the structure and function of human organs.
Computer Science & Engineering
Shantanu Chakrabartty, PhD, professor, begins July 1, 2015.
About: Chakrabartty comes to WUSTL from Michigan State University, where he has been on the faculty since 2004, most recently as associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also is an adjunct professor in the Department of Biosystems Engineering. He is a co-founder and chief technical officer of Piezonix LLC, a company in East Lansing, Mich., that makes Self-Powered Piezo-floating-gate (PFG) Sensing technology.
Education: Chakrabartty earned master’s and doctoral degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology. Previously, he worked as an engineer in industry and in research at the University of Tokyo and at Johns Hopkins.
Research: Chakrabartty is a renowned expert in floating-gate circuits and systems for energy scavenging and self-powering applications. He received the prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation in 2010 and the Innovator of the Year award from MSU Technologies in 2012.
Roman Garnett, PhD, assistant professor, begins Jan. 1, 2015.
About: Most recently, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bonn in Germany in the knowledge discovery and machine learning group. He also did postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, he was an applied research mathematician for the U.S. National Security Agency at Fort Meade and at the Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham, U.K. He has been a guest lecturer at the University of Bonn and was a teaching assistant while at WUSTL.
Education: Garnett is a WUSTL alumnus, earning a bachelor’s in mathematics and a master’s in computer science in 2004. He earned a doctorate in engineering science from the University of Oxford in 2010.
Research: Garnett’s research interest is developing new Bayesian machine-learning techniques for sequential decision-making under uncertainty. He is interested in active learning, especially with atypical objectives, Bayesian optimization, intelligent approaches to approximate Bayesian inference, and Bayesian quadrature.
Brendan Juba, PhD, assistant professor, begins Sept. 1, 2014.
About: Juba will come to WUSTL from Harvard University, where he has been a postdoctoral researcher. He was a postdoctoral research associate at Harvard and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where he also was a research assistant.
Education : He earned a doctorate in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010, and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005.
Research : Juba’s research involves theoretical approaches to artificial intelligence founded on the theory of algorithms and computational complexity. He studies how knowledge can be robustly extracted from data and integrated with “hidden knowledge” that may not be present in the data.
Angelina Lee, PhD, assistant professor, begins Sept. 1, 2014.
About : Since August 2012, Lee has been a postdoctoral associate in the SuperTech Research Group at MIT’s CSAIL. Previously, she was a research scientist at Intel Corp. She has a four-year grant funded by the National Science Foundation, and previously had a two-year grant funded by the NSF.
Education : Lee earned a doctorate and an S.M. in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of California, San Diego.
Research : Lee work focuses on making parallel programming accessible for everyone so that any programmer can rapidly develop high performance software that takes advantage of commodity multicore hardware. She is interested in developing practical parallel systems based on solid theoretical foundations.
Ben Moseley, PhD, assistant professor, begins July 1, 2014.
About: Moseley joins WUSTL from the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, where he has been a research assistant professor for two years. Previously, he did short-term research at the University of Pittsburgh, Sandia National Laboratories, Columbia University and Yahoo! Labs.
Education : Moseley earned three degrees at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: a bachelor’s in computer science in 2006, a master’s in 2008 and a doctorate in 2012.
Research : Moseley’s research interests are in theoretical computer science, including the design, analysis and limitations of online and approximation algorithms. He also is interested in the applications of algorithms. Recently, his work has focused on problems arising in scheduling, large data analysis and parallel computing.
Electrical & Systems Engineering
Zach Feinstein, PhD, assistant professor, begins July 1, 2014.
About : While earning a doctorate at Princeton University, Feinstein has supervised the senior thesis-writing group and has assisted in teaching several courses. Previously, has did research at Hunan University in China and was an intern at Millennium Partners LP and Lehman Brothers Inc., both in New York City.
Education : Feinstein recently earned a doctorate from Princeton University, where he also earned a master’s degree. He also is a WUSTL alumnus, earning bachelor’s degrees in systems science & engineering and in applied mathematics in 2009.
Research : At Princeton, he has been working in operations research and financial engineering to study and define the formulation for dynamic risk measures in markets with transaction costs, to develop and algorithm to calculate risk measures in markets with transaction costs and to study and define measures of systemic risk.
Matthew Lew, PhD, assistant professor, begins July 1, 2015.
About: While at Stanford University, Lew has worked in the lab of W. E. Moerner, PhD, who earned three bachelor's degrees from Washington University in St. Louis in 1975. In addition, Lew co-designed the “Introduction to Photonics” course at Stanford and was a teaching assistant while at CalTech.
Education: Lew recently earned a doctorate in electrical engineering at Stanford. He also earned a master’s from Stanford in 2010 and a bachelor’s degree from the California Institute of Technology.
Research: Lew’s research interest is in developing optical tools for biology and medicine. While at Stanford, Lew designed microscopes and developed computational tools for three-dimensional super-resolution fluorescence imaging. In addition, he simultaneously measured the orientation and 3D position of single molecules for the first time.
Silvia Zhang, PhD, assistant professor, begins Jan. 1, 2015.
About: Zhang is a postdoctoral fellow in computer science at Harvard University, where she works on the RoboBee BrainSoC and energy-efficient computing projects. She has worked as a graduate research assistant at Cornell University studying variability-tolerant circuits. She has also worked as a design intern for Broadcom in Irvine, Calif., a summer analyst at First Manhattan Consulting Group in New York City and as an intern at Schlumberger in Houston.
Education: Zhang earned a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University in 2012. She earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2006.
Research: Her research interests are in efficient and reliable System-on-Chip (SoC) for miniaturized autonomous robotics, failure-resilient and harsh environment-capable embedded cyber-physical systems, tools and automation for workload-aware, data-centric, energy-efficient computing and circuit interfaces with nano and micro-electro-mechanical systems devices for biomedical applications.
Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering
Rajan Chakrabarty, PhD, assistant professor, begins Aug. 15, 2014.
About: Chakrabarty is assistant research professor and co-investigator of the Laboratory for Aerosol Science, Spectroscopy and Optics at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev. In addition, he is on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. He has developed two scientific software packages and holds two U.S. Patents with two pending.
Education: Chakrabarty earned a doctorate in chemical physics in 2008 and a master’s in atmospheric sciences in 2006 from the University of Nevada-Reno. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electronics and instrumentation from the University of Madras in 2003.
Research: His research interests are in aerosol physics and atmospheric radiation transfer in addressing current energy issues, including investigating the role of atmospheric aerosols in earth’s energy balance using novel instrumentation and diagnostic techniques and models.
Elijah Thimsen, PhD, assistant professor, PhD, begins Aug. 15, 2014. About: He is a research associate at the University of Minnesota in chemical engineering and materials science & mechanical engineering. Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate at the University of Minnesota, in the materials science division at Argonne National Laboratory and in the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Chemical Engineering at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
Education: Thimsen earned a doctorate in energy, environmental & chemical engineering from WUSTL in 2009, working in the lab of Pratim Biswas, PhD, professor and chair of the department. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota.
Research: His research is on gas-phase synthesis of inorganic nanomaterials for energy applications. At the University of Minnesota, he has focused on plasma synthesis of metal-sulfide and metal-oxide nanocrystals and their application to electrochemical energy storage and optoelectronic devices. He holds two U.S. Patents and a handful of funded proposals.
Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science
Mark Meacham, PhD, assistant professor, begins July 1, 2014. About: Meachum comes to WUSTL as founding partner, president and CEO of OpenCell Technologies, an early stage company focused on commercialization of new technologies for intracellular biomaterial delivery based in Atlanta. He started the company after completing postdoctoral research at Georgia Institute of Technology and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Biochemical Sciences Division.
Education: Meacham earned a doctorate in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech in 2006, and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering from Iowa State University.
Research: His research focuses on transport phenomena and the thermal-fluid sciences to develop and evaluate microfluidic and micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS)-based technologies and tools for use in diverse fields including energy systems and the life sciences.