Introducing the
New Faculty
(Tenure and
Tenure-Track)
of
Virginia Tech’s
College
of Engineering
2014 -15
Academic Year
The Signature Engineering Building, the most instrumented building
in the world for vibrations, opened in the summer of 2014. The
SEB allows faculty and students to measure even the smallest
vibrations. This living laboratory detects a variety of measures,
including: where people are in the building; normal structural
settling and wind loads; and any movement that might result from a
significant event such as an earthquake.
OVERVIEW
The College of Engineering is pleased to present 27 new
faculty for the 2014-15 academic year:
Aerospace and Ocean Engineering
Colin S. Adams
Jonathan T. Black
Bruvana Srinivasan
Biological Systems Engineering
Xueyang Feng
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Kevin Heaslip
Kyle Strom
Katerina Ziotopoulou
Chemical Engineering
Ayman M. Karim
Hongliang Xin
Computer Science
Bert Huang
Kurt Luther
Sharath Raghvendra
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Harpreet Dhillon
Walid Saad
Haibo Zeng
Engineering Education
Kenneth J. Reid
Donna Riley
Engineering Science and Mechanics
(This department is merging with Biomedical Engineering;
the new name is not available at press time.)
Jonathan B. Boreyko
Industrial and Systems Engineering
Xi Chen
Nathan Ka Ching Lau
Diego Moran
Materials Science and Engineering
Johan Foster
Mechanical Engineering
Reza Mirzaeifar
Rui Qiao
Zhiting Tian
Lei Zuo
School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences
Steve Rowson
AEROSPACE AND OCEAN ENGINEERING
Colin S. Adams is finishing his Ph.D. in electrical engineering with the University of New
Mexico at Albuquerque, researching laboratory astrophysical plasmas at the Los Alamos
National Laboratory (LANL), before joining
Virginia Tech for spring semester of 2015. His
research focuses on interactions between colliding supersonic plasma jets in the presence
of a background magnetic field.
These interactions are relevant to the study
ADAMS
of plasma shocks as well as plasma instabilities, and are thought to generate collisionless shocks which may
accelerate particles to very high energies when they occur in
astrophysical regimes. His future research interests are primarily
in hypersonics, space propulsion, multi-objective vehicle optimization, high-energy density plasma physics, and magneto-inertial
fusion plasmas.
He earned his bachelor of science in aeronautical and astronautical engineering and a master of science in aeronautics and
astronautics from the University of Washington at Seattle in 2005
and in 2009 respectively. While at the University of Washington, he
experimentally researched stabilization of axial-flow Z-pinch plasmas applicable to spacecraft propulsion and thermonuclear fusion.
While completing his master’s degree, Adams also interned with
Honeywell International, modeling aircraft response to wind-shear
conditions, developing requirements for terrain and wind-shear
warning products, and designing and performing flight, ground,
and laboratory tests for Federal Aviation Administration certification
of avionics systems.
From July 2007 until June 2010, he was an aeronautical engineer at Analytical Methods, Inc. of Redmond, Washington, where
he utilized computational-fluid-dynamic models to design aircraft
and aircraft modifications, as well as analyze performance, drag,
stability and control, and loads. He conducted post-masters research at LANL from July 2010 to August 2011, where he studied
the formation of spherical plasma liners for high-energy-density
physics research and was involved with projects investigating topics ranging from magneto-inertial fusion to magnetic reconnection.
His work has been published in journals and presented at
meetings of the American Physical Society, the American Institute
of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers, the American Institute of Physics, and the
International Atomic Energy Agency.
Since 2007 Jonathan T. Black has served
as a faculty member in the aeronautics and
astronautics department at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base, Ohio. At the institute, Black was a
founding member and director of the Center for
Space Research and Assurance.
As director, Black focused the center’s efforts on the execution of cutting-edge space
technology development and scientific space
BLACK
experiments in collaboration with government
organizations. He held multiple responsibilities: helped manage
and execute the annual $2 million center research portfolio; supervised a diverse group of 20 consisting of research faculty, program
managers, laboratory and administrative staff, graduate students,
and summer interns; briefed senior Department of Defense and
intelligence community leadership advising national strategy and
decision-making; led AFIT outreach to new sponsors and partners;
and developed creative research and educational relationships
inside and outside of AFIT.
At AFIT Black secured $8.1 million in joint research funding,
including nationally competitive awards through the Air Force,
NASA, and DARPA. Among his many publications, he has 22
archival journal papers. His main interests are space systems,
advanced lightweight aerospace structures, autonomous vehicles,
advanced sensing technology, and novel orbital analysis.
Prior to joining AFIT, Black earned his doctorate in mechanical
engineering in 2006 from the University of Kentucky. He earned
his master’s degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering in
2003 from George Washington University. His bachelor’s degree in
industrial engineering with an international minor in French studies
was awarded in 2001 from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.
Among his honors, Black was the first member of the AFIT
faculty to receive an Air Force Office of Science Research Young
Investigator Research Program Grant. At the time in 2007, he was
one of 29 recipients nationally out of a pool of 215 applicants.
He is also an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Associate Fellow. In 2010 he received a Southwestern
Ohio Council for Higher Education Faculty Excellence in Teaching
Award. In 2012 Black received an AIAA Special Service Citation
for his work as general chair of the Dayton-Cincinnati Aerospace
Sciences Symposium.
He held a Kentucky Graduate Scholarship from 2003 until 2006,
and a NASA Graduate Student Researchers Program Fellowship
from 2004 until 2006. He received the AIAA Foundation Willy Z.
Sadeh Award in Space Sciences and Space Engineering in 200405.
He is also a member of the Society of Experimental Mechanics
and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Bhuvana Srinivasan worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Theoretical Division
for approximately four years, first as a postdoctoral researcher and then as a staff scientist.
Among her duties at the laboratory, Srinivasan primarily focused on studying plasma
physics effects in fusion that can mitigate
turbulent mix of hot and cold fuel and consequently, help achieve fusion conditions.
This work is relevant to experiments at the
SRINIVASAN
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s
National Ignition Facility and at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics. She was also a participant in a project
that aimed to self-consistently study ion species separation for
multi-fluid plasma shocks relevant to inertial confinement fusion.
Additionally, she works in the fields of space plasma physics and
computational methods for plasma physics at Los Alamos.
Srinivasan attended the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)
where she earned her bachelor’s degree in aerospace and mechanical engineering in 2004. She attended graduate school at the
University of Washington, Seattle, where she received a master’s
and a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics in 2006 and in
2010, respectively.
Her research interests are in advanced space propulsion,
nuclear fusion, hypersonics, space plasmas, and computational
plasma physics.
Her previous work experience includes a stint as a researcher
for Tech-X Corporation of Boulder, Colorado, where she worked on
numerical methods for plasma fluid equations. She also co-oped
as an undergraduate for Gamma Technologies Inc., of Westmont,
Illinois, where she developed a code for helical spring dynamics.
Among her honors, Srinivasan received the 2007-08 Amelia
Earhart Fellowship and was named the Outstanding Female Engineer from the Society of Women Engineers at the University of
Washington in 2006-07. She has been a member of the American
Physical Society, AIAA, and IEEE.
BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
Xueyang Feng received his bachelor’s degree
in environmental engineering from Huazhong
University of Science and Technology, as well
as a bachelor’s degree in biology from Wuhan
University, both located in Wuhan, China. Both
degrees were awarded in 2008. Four years later, he earned a Ph.D. in energy, environmental
and chemical engineering from Washington
University in St. Louis, Missouri.
Since 2012 he has worked as a post-docFENG
toral fellow at Energy Biosciences Institute of
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In his research with
this institute, Feng has focused on metabolic engineering of yeast
(e.g. Saccharomyces cerevisiae) for efficient C5/C6 sugar utilization and advanced biofuel production.
Specifically, Feng has genetically engineered S. cerevisiae for
production of fatty-acid-based biofuels, including fatty alcohols and
fatty alkanes. He has analyzed the glucose and xylose utilization
of S. cerevisiae and Scheffersomyces stipiti strains via 13C metabolic flux (13C -MFA). He also conducted transcriptional studies of
host dependence in xylose utilization of recombinant S. cerevisiae
strains.
Among his honors, Feng won the Doctoral Student Research
Award in 2011 from Washington University’s Department of
Energy, Environmental, and Chemical Engineering, and the Shen
Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2013 from the University of Illinois’
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
He has served as a teaching assistant for three courses: thermodynamics, kinetics and reaction engineering principles, and
transport phenomena.
He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Petroleum and
Environmental Biotechnology. He is a reviewer for the following
publications: Bioinformatics, Biochemical Engineering Journal,
Colloids and Surfaces B, Journal of Petroleum and Environmental
Biotechnology, and the Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Among his some two dozen publications, he is the co-author
of one book chapter, “Metabolic pathway determination and flux
analysis in non-model microorganisms through C-isotope labeling”
in Microbial Systems Biology: Methods and
Protocols.
CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL
ENGINEERING
HEASLIP
Kevin P. Heaslip is returning to Virginia Tech
where he earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in civil engineering in 2002 and in
2003, respectively. He attended the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst, for his doctoral
studies in civil engineering, graduating in 2007.
In 2008 Heaslip joined the civil and environmental engineering faculty as an assistant professor at Utah State University, and
since July of 2011 he has also served as the associate director of
the Utah Transportation Center of Logan, Utah. He was recently
promoted to associate professor and granted tenure as well.
At Utah State, Heaslip has participated in almost $16 million in
funded research with more than $5 million as his personal share.
His work included such projects as: the implementation of a pavement management system for the Forest Service; alternative and
unconventional energy research and development for the U.S. Department of Energy; safety enhancement programs for local governments for the Utah Department of Transportation; and highway
work zone safety issues for the Federal Highway Administration.
He has taught in the areas of traffic engineering, transportation
engineering, public transportation, and urban and regional transportation planning.
Among his professional activities, Heaslip has served as
co-chair of the Intelligent Transportation Society (ITS) America
Electronic Payment Systems Special Interest Group since 2008.
He is a current member of the Transportation Research Board’s
Committees on Signing and Marking Materials and on Vehicle
Highway Automation. He is also a member of the ITS of America
Crosscutting Forum and the Institute of Transportation Engineers
Transportation Curriculum Advisory Committee.
His professional experience includes a stint as an adjunct science advisor for Alion Science and Technology (AST) of Alexandria, Virginia, since 2008. He also served as a science advisor to
AST from 2006 until 2008. He was a traffic engineer for Gannett
Fleming, Inc., Newport News, Virginia, from 2003 until 2004, and
was an intern with Howard/Stein-Hudson Associates, Boston,
Massachusetts, from 2001 until 2002.
His honors include the Virginia Tech Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering Outstanding Young Alumnus for 201314; the Utah State University Civil and Environmental Engineering
Undergraduate Research Mentor of the Year for 2013; and several
additional Utah State awards for research and for mentoring.
Kyle Strom obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 2006. From 2007 to 2013, he
served as an assistant professor at the University of Houston’s Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering. In September of
2013 he was promoted to associate professor.
Strom’s research group focuses on improving understanding of fluid and sediment interactions in natural environments such as rivers,
estuaries, and deltas. They have studied these
STROM
processes at smaller spatial and temporal
scales where the interaction of individual sediment particles in the
bed or water column can alter the overall transport properties of
the sediment. They also study the impact of fluid-sediment interactions at larger scales such as those important in the development
and change of deltas and submarine fans and the long-term
alterations of rivers due to shifts in climate and sediment supply.
Improving understanding in these areas aids responsible management of river and coastal resources and infrastructure, and helps
to give a more accurate understanding of earth’s history and its
future trajectory.
Strom has advised two Ph.D. students to completion with
another four currently working with him. He has graduated three
master’s students, and has worked with a host of undergraduate
students as research assistants.
To fund his group’s research, he has attracted sponsorship from
a number of external agencies, including: ExxonMobil Upstream
Research Company, Texas Water Development Board, American
Chemical Society, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Industrial Pipe
Fittings, the Texas Department of Transportation, and the Texas
Hazardous Waste Research Center.
Strom developed two new graduate courses while at the
University of Houston: environmental fluid mechanics and river
mechanics and sediment transport. He also regularly taught an
undergraduate fluid mechanics course and has organized weekly
departmental seminars and mentored undergraduate research
project courses. As recognition of his effort in the classroom, he
received the Cullen College of Engineering Outstanding Teaching
Award in 2010 and 2012. He served as the faculty advisor for the
Chi Epsilon student chapter from 2013 to 2014, and as the faculty
advisor for the student chapter of the American Society of Civil
Engineers (ASCE) from 2009 through 2010.
Among his service activities, Strom serves as an associate
editor of the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, and he is a current
member of the ASCE Environmental and Water Resources Institute Technical Committee on Sedimentation.
He is a publication reviewer for journals such as: the Journal of
Hydraulic Engineering, Journal of Geophysical Research, Water Resources Research, Environmental Fluid Mechanics, Earth
Surface Processes and Landforms, Geomorphology, Journal of
Sedimentary Research, Marine Geology, Journal of Hydrology,
Journal of Hydrologic Processes, and others.
He is a member of the American Geophysical Union and the
American Society of Civil Engineers.
Katerina Ziotopoulou earned her doctorate in geotechnical engineering with a minor
in structural engineering from the University
of California (UC) at Davis in the summer of
2014. She obtained her master’s degree in
geotechnical engineering in June of 2010 at
the same university.
Ziotopoulou earned her undergraduate
degree summa cum laude in civil engineering
in December of 2007 from the National TechniZIOTOPOULOU
cal University of Athens (NTUA), Greece.
This course of study was a five-year degree that concluded with
a thesis on her undergraduate research on the non-linear seismic
response analysis of soil deposits and piles and the proposal of a
unique bi-normalized design spectrum.
Her doctoral work was focused on geotechnical earthquake
engineering and more specifically on the numerical modeling of
liquefaction effects. She developed, implemented, calibrated, and
validated a version of a sand plasticity model for earthquake engineering applications. During her studies at UC Davis, Ziotopoulou
partnered with the California Department of Water Resources’ Division of Safety of Dams in a joint project on the case-based evaluation of liquefaction procedures for dams. Her role was to provide a
constitutive model for sands capable of reasonably approximating
the wide range of loading conditions and responses as the ones
observed in dams. She undertook similar roles in collaborations
with companies of the Bay Area on a variety of projects.
In Greece, after her graduation, she assisted in the investigation
of the effectiveness of stone columns for drainage and reinforcement as part of the seismic stability of the library building and the
retaining walls of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center.
During her undergraduate studies she interned in a structural
engineering office focusing on the design of reinforced concrete
buildings.
During her time at UC Davis and aside from her doctoral work,
Ziotopoulou has initially participated and, later on, led over 13
outreach events, ranging from full-day workshops for teachers
to earthquake engineering demonstrations and tours for K-12
students.
Among her awards, she is a recipient of the 2008-2011 International Fulbright Science and Technology Award presented yearly
to 40 individuals around the world. Within her graduate group at
UC Davis, she held a Fugro West Graduate Fellowship in 2013
and the Idriss Award for Excellence in Geotechnical Engineering in
2012. In 2007 she received the Ippokleides Vogiatzopoulos Award,
the top student honor at NTUA. That same year she also earned
NTUA’s Thomaideio Academic Award and Medal of Honor as well
as the Nikolaou Kritikou Award.
She is a member of the Association for Women in Science, the
Greek Women in Engineering Association, and the Association
of Civil Engineers of Greece. She is a member of the American
Society of Civil Engineers, the Earthquake Engineering Research
Institute, the United States Society on Dams, and the Seismological Society of America and a reviewer for two journals on her field.
She is also a registered civil engineer of the Technical Chamber of
Greece and an engineer-in-training at the state of California.
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING
Since 2008 Ayman M. Karim has worked
as a senior research scientist at the Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), one
among 10 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
national laboratories managed by DOE’s Office
of Science. Its work is dedicated towards finding innovative solutions for the DOE, the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, the National
Nuclear Security Administration, other government agencies, universities, and industry.
KARIM
During his time at PNNL, Karim managed
several projects and a multidisciplinary team of scientists. Among
his research accomplishments, his work using microfluidics to
follow, in-situ, the nucleation and growth of colloidal nanoparticles,
changed how the synthesis mechanisms are viewed by revealing
the direct interaction of the capping agent with the precursor and
nanoparticles. He has developed new catalysts and processes for
the conversion of biomass to fuels and chemicals, as well as highly
active, selective and stable catalysts for the steam reforming of
biomass derived oxygenates. He has also designed a suspendedslurry reactor for the catalytic dehydrogenation of liquid hydrogen
carriers for vehicle on-board hydrogen generation (patent pending).
Prior to joining PNNL, Karim did a postdoctoral stay (2007-2008)
with Dionisios G. Vlachos at the University of Delaware. While
in this position, he developed an integrated methodology for the
reconstruction of Ru particle size and shape; a microkinetic model
for ammonia decomposition on Ru-based catalysts; and a catalytic
methanol microburner capable of self-igniting from room temperature.
He obtained his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of New Mexico (2007) where he worked on designing catalysts
and microreactors for on-board hydrogen generation for portable
power applications under the guidance of Abhaya K. Datye.
Karim obtained his undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering from Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt in 2000, his master’s
and doctoral degrees in chemical engineering from the University
of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2003 and in 2007,
respectively.
He has 35 peer reviewed publications, 10 invited lectures and
presentations and one patent.
He is currently a co-principal investigator on the Synchrotron
Catalysis Consortium and an affiliated member with the Catalysis
Center for Energy Innovation, an Energy Frontier Research Center
at the University of Delaware.
At Virginia Tech, Karim plans to grow a research program focused on developing novel catalytic materials for biomass conversion, shale gas utilization and automotive emission control using
his expertise in nanomaterials synthesis and in situ/in operando
catalyst characterization by transmission electron microscopy, Xray absorption and infrared spectroscopies.
Hongliang Xin spent the past year as a postdoctoral research fellow at the SLAC National
Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University,
one of ten U.S. Department of Energy Office
of Science laboratories. It is known for building the world’s longest particle accelerator, the
discovery of some of the fundamental building
blocks of matter, and the creation of the first
website in North America. SLAC was originally
named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
XIN
when it was founded in 1962 but the DOE
changed its name to only reflect the acronym of SLAC in 2008.
At SLAC, Xin has been working on the surface reactivity of transition-metal alloys and oxides and on the understanding dynamics
of surface bond breaking and formation.
Prior to joining SLAC Xin was a postdoctoral research fellow at
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. In this position, he
developed predictive theory and modeling techniques for photochemical reactions on metals driven by energetic charge carriers.
Xin is a doctoral graduate of the University of Michigan, earning
his Ph.D. in 2011 in chemical engineering. Previously he received
his bachelor’s degree in 2002 from Tianjin University of Tianjin,
China, and his master’s degree in 2005 from Tsinghua University
of Beijing, China.
Among his honors, he was a KOKES award recipient at the 2011
22nd North American Catalysis Society Meeting, held in Detroit,
Michigan. He was a 2011 recipient of a Weber Graduate Student
Award in Environmental and Energy Sustainability. He won the
2007 Best Student Poster Award at the Annual Symposium of the
Michigan Catalysis Society, Ford Motor Company. In China, he
received a Sinopec Fellowship and a Rongzhijian Fellowship.
COMPUTER SCIENCE
HUANG
Bert Huang, who received his doctorate in
computer science from Columbia University
in 2011, already has his name on six patents,
ranging from machine learning for power grids
to ways to analyze spatiotemporally ambiguous
events to combinatorial optimization methods
and systems.
He also earned two master’s degrees from
Columbia University: a master of science in
computer science and a master of philosophy
in computer science, obtained in 2006 and 2008, respectively.
He received his undergraduate degree in computer science from
Brandeis University in 2004.
Huang earned two awards from Columbia University: the 2010
Andrew P. Kosoresow Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching
and Service and a 2009 Service Award from its computer science
department.
Since fall of 2011, Huang has worked as a postdoctoral research
associate at the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer
Science. He conducts collaborative research on machine learning in network and relational domains, focusing on topics including large-scale probabilistic methods and computational learning
theory for structured models.
Huang spent the summer of 2010 as a research intern at the
IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. There he explored spatial prediction approaches for performing analytics of city services
as part of the Smarter Planet initiative. He also developed semantically meaningful feature-design methods for computer visionbased activity recognition.
Huang has served as a National Science Foundation review
panelist. He has also been a reviewer for the Journal of Machine
Learning Research, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data
Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and
the International Journal on Computational Statistics.
He was an organizer of the Eleventh Workshop on Mining and
Learning with Graphs, and an area conference chair and senior
program committee member for the 2014 International Conference
on Machine Learning (ICML) and the 2014 Conference on Neural
Information Processing Systems (NIPS).
Huang was also a program committee member of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS)
2013, 2014; ICML 2012, 2013; Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence
(UAI) 2010–2013; and the International Conference on Pattern
Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM) 2012. His papers
have been published in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational
Biology and Bioinformatics, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia,
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence,
and the proceedings of top conferences including NIPS, ICML,
AISTATS, UAI, AAAI, and KDD.
Kurt Luther earned his bachelor’s degree in
computer graphics technology with a minor in
art and design from Purdue University in 2006.
Next, he enrolled at Georgia Tech where he received a doctorate in human-centered computing with a focus on social computing in 2012.
Shortly after he completed his graduate
studies, he moved to Carnegie Mellon University, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he
worked as a post-doctoral fellow in its HumanLUTHER
Computer Interaction Institute.
Luther’s main research interests are in human-computer interaction, social computing, creativity, design, and digital humanities.
Other employment opportunities Luther enjoyed included: a research internship with YouTube, Google of San Bruno, California;
a web development internship with Newgrounds.com of Glenside,
Pennsylvania; an internship with the social computing group of Microsoft Research of Redmond, Washington; and an internship with
the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center of Hawthorne, New York.
Among his awards, Luther received a 2013 Best Paper Award
from the ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
conference. A year earlier, he received a Best Paper Award Honorable Mention from the same conference. At Georgia Tech he was a
2011 Foley Scholar. At Purdue he graduated with highest distinction and honors, and he earned an Academic Success Award from
2002 through 2006, an $11,100 merit scholarship.
His activities with the ACM professional society are impressive. For the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems (CHI), he served as an associate chair of videos for 2011,
2012, and 2013, and will co-chair the videos program for 2016. He
also served as chair of research posters for the ACM Conference
on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) in
2012 and 2013. For the ACM Conference on Computer Supported
Cooperative Work, he is a member of the program committee for
2015.
He is a journal reviewer for American Behavioral Scientist,
Games and Culture, and Human-Computer Interaction.
Sharath Raghvendra’s research interest
focuses on the design of algorithms for geometric problems. He is particularly interested
in the creation of algorithmic tools and methodologies which are applicable to large-scale,
unstructured, and potentially very high dimensional geometric data.
He obtained his Ph.D. from Duke University in 2012. In his dissertation, “Geometric
Approximation Algorithms - A Summary Based
RAGHVENDRA
Approach,” he designed algorithms based on
a meaningful and succinct representation of large scale geometric
data, for which he won the best doctoral dissertation award. His
dissertation also got a nomination for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award from Duke University.
For the last two years, he has continued his research as a
postdoctoral scholar in the departments of computer science and
management sciences at Stanford University. Some of his most
recent work is applicable to the areas of logistics, big data, data
analysis, and liquidity in credit networks. With respect to logistics,
he has designed faster combinatorial algorithms for pickup and
delivery problems. He has also established various connections of
geometric summaries to clustering, classification and topological
data analysis of large-scale and high-dimensional data. For credit
networks, he has designed new mathematical tools to analyze
liquidity for various network topologies.
He conducted his undergraduate work at the Indian Institute
of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, India, obtaining his
degree in computer science and engineering in 2006 where he
received a dean’s scholarship for academic excellence for his four
years.
ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING
DHILLON
For the past year Harpreet S. Dhillon has
worked as a postdoctoral research associate
at the University of Southern California, Los
Angeles, where he is a part of the Communication Sciences Institute. At USC, he holds a
Viterbi Postdoctoral Fellowship.
In this capacity, he is working on multiantenna wireless backhaul networks, where
the goal is to understand the minimum antenna
requirement per base station to implement a
throughput scalable wireless backhaul net-
work. A key takeaway of this work is that the antenna requirement
of a short-hop strategy, where each cell relays data to its immediate neighbor until it reaches from the source to its destination
cell, is significantly more efficient than a more intuitive long-hop
strategy, where the source cell uses multiple antennas to form thin
beams towards the direction of the destination cell with the goal of
minimizing the hops.
Dhillon’s research interests are broadly in communications and
networks. His current work is focused on: heterogeneous cellular
networks; stochastic geometry for wireless ad hoc and cellular
networks; capacity scaling laws for wireless networks; Internet
of things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications;
energy harvesting in wireless networks; and dynamic resource allocation in cognitive radio networks.
As a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, he
worked with the Wireless Networking and Communications Group,
where he proposed a first comprehensive framework for the design
and analysis of the K-tier heterogeneous cellular network (HetNet)
using tools from stochastic geometry and point process theory. In
addition to being realistic and scalable, the framework is remarkably tractable, often leading to easy-to-use expressions for key
performance metrics such as coverage probability and data rate.
Using this framework, he has studied several key aspects of HetNets, including the effect of deploying multi-antenna small cells,
effect of load disparity in macro and small cells, and, most recently,
the effect of adding energy harvesting capability to the base stations, which was featured in the MIT Technology Review.
Dhillon has had several stints with employment in industry. He
was a research intern at Samsung Research America of Richardson, Texas in the summer of 2012. The previous summer he
interned at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs of Holmdel, New Jersey in its
Wireless Research Department. In 2009, he interned at Qualcomm, Inc., of San Diego, California.
Among his honors, Dhillon is a co-recipient of three best paper
awards: the 2014 Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
(IEEE) Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize for
the best paper published in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas
in Communications in the previous three calendar years, the 2014
European Wireless Conference Best Student Paper Award, and
the 2013 IEEE International Conference in Communications (ICC)
best paper award in Wireless Communications Symposium.
He has 17 journal publications with another three currently under
review. His name appears on three provisional patents in the communications area and a fourth patent on a sleep apnea monitoring
device that he built as an undergrad.
He is a technical reviewer for 15 different IEEE journals, six
other journals, as well as numerous conferences.
Dhillon received his bachelor’s degree in electronics and communication engineering in 2008 from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, a master’s degree in electrical engineering (EE)
in 2010 from Virginia Tech, and his doctorate in EE in 2013 from
the University of Texas at Austin.
SAAD
Since 2011, Walid Saad has worked as an
assistant professor at the University of Miami’s
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. During his tenure at Miami, he has
received two grants from the National Science
Foundation (NSF) that include a $443,154
CAREER Award for developing self-organizing
wireless small cell networks and a $149,965
NeTs JUNO award for optimizing hyper-dense
networks with trillions of devices. This latter is a collaborative effort
with Florida International University (FIU) and Tohuku University,
Japan.
In 2014, he received the Summer Faculty Fellowship from the
Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) for pursuing
collaborative work on game-theoretic security at the Air Force
Research Laboratory in Rome, New York. He has also received
the NSF ERC-CAREER supplemental grant for establishing international collaboration with Ecole Superieure D’Electricite (SUPELEC), France, as part of his CAREER grant.
His previous employment includes an eight-month position with
Princeton University’s Department of Electrical Engineering as a
postdoctoral research associate. He was also a visiting scholar at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois from 2008
until 2009.
Saad had three additional visiting scholar appointments with SUPELEC, France, the University of Houston, Texas, and Deutsche
Telecom, Berlin, Germany. He now collaborates with colleagues
at all of these universities as well as researchers at many other institutions such as Rutgers University, Temple University, Tsinghua
University, China, University of Tehran, Iran, and more.
He is the co-author of one textbook, Game Theory in Wireless
and Communications Networks: Theory, Models, and Applications,
published by Cambridge Press. He is the co-author of four book
chapters on various aspects of networks. Saad has 27 journal
papers and 66 conference papers. He and two of his colleagues
have a patent filed on a method for securing backscatter communication systems.
In addition to his CAREER award, he has received four best
paper awards. They were from the following conferences: 2012
IEEE WCNC, 2010 IARIA ICIMP, and the 2009 ICST/IEEE WiOpt,
as well as from the WUN CogCOM consortium in 2013.
In 2014, he was a plenary speaker at the 2nd NEXT - Workshop
on Networks and Externalities organized by the Institute of Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
He has five Ph.D. students working directly with him, and two
undergraduate researchers.
His professional service includes the co-chair position 2014 for:
5th Conference on Decision and Game Theory for Security, IEEE
INFOCOM’s 3rd Workshop on Smart Energy Systems; IEEE ICC,
Workshop on Wireless Physical Layer Security; and IEEE International Conference on Communications, 3rd Workshop on Small
Cell Networks. He is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions
on Communications and the IEEE Communication Tutorials &
Surveys.
Saad attended Lebanese University, Lebanon where he obtained his bachelor’s degree in electrical, computer, and telecommunications engineering in 2004. He moved to the American
University of Beirut, Lebanon to study for his master’s degree,
awarded in 2007 in computer and communication engineering. His
received his doctorate in 2010 from the University of Oslo, Norway.
ZENG
After receiving his doctorate in 2008, Haibo
Zeng took his first job with General Motors
Research and Development at Palo Alto, California. He started as a researcher in August of
2008 and was promoted to senior researcher
in February of 2010. He left GM to join McGill
University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an assistant professor in
November of 2011.
Zeng’s research interests are in embedded
systems, cyber-physical systems, real-time systems, and electronic design automation.
Among his honors, Zeng has received three best paper awards.
They were from the 2013 Euromicro Conference on Real-Time
Systems, and the 2011 and 2009 Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ (IEEE) Symposiums on Industrial Embedded
Systems. He won the Peter Silvester Faculty Research Award from
McGill University in 2013.
He is the co-author of two textbooks: Embedded Systems Development – Form Functional Models to Implementations and Understanding and Using the Controller Area Network Communication
Protocol: Theory and Practice. He has 16 refereed journals and 36
refereed conference publications.
At McGill University, he taught two undergraduate courses:
introduction to software engineering and introduction to computer
engineering. He taught one newly developed graduate level class,
model-based design of embedded systems.
He is the current chair of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society, Montreal Section. He served as the guest editor of the 2012
Special Issue on System Level Design of Automotive Electronics/
Software, IEEE Embedded Systems Letters. He held the same
position for the 2010 Special Issue on Automotive Embedded Systems, IEEE Embedded Systems Letters. He has served on more
than 20 conference technical committees. He is also a reviewer for
six IEEE/ACM transactions, and five other technical journals.
Zeng obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical
engineering (EE) in 1999 and in 2002, respectively, from Tsinghua
University, Beijing, China. His doctorate in electrical engineering
and computer sciences was awarded in 2008 from the University
of California at Berkeley.
ENGINEERING EDUCATION
Since 2008 Kenneth J. Reid has worked on
the faculty at Ohio Northern University, starting as the director of its first-year engineering
program and as a member of its electrical and
computer engineering (ECE) and computer
science departments. In 2011 his responsibilities broadened to program director of the new
engineering education degree program.
In this position, Reid was in charge of creating, developing, and implementing all of the
REID
courses in the new engineering education
degree that was approved in March of 2011 and offered to students the following fall semester. He also advised all engineering
education students, and created and directed international service
opportunities for Ohio Northern’s College of Engineering.
His work also involved the development of retention and first
year mentor programs. He worked on the implementation of assessment methods, and advised all incoming students in ECE.
Prior to his tenure at Ohio Northern, Reid started in 1996 as an
assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering technology at Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at Indiana
University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). In 2002 he was
promoted to associate professor.
His professional employment also included seven years as an
electronic engineer at the Electronics Manufacturing Productivity
Facility of the Naval Weapons Support Center, Crane, Indiana.
From 1989 until 1996 he specialized in electronics manufacturing
research, research in automated inspection of soldered connections using laser topography and x-ray, and image processing.
Reid is a nationally recognized expert in automated inspection.
His honors include the 2012 Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers-USA Individual Professional Achievement Award for his
pioneering undergraduate curriculum to train K-12 STEM educators. He was also named a 2013 National Effective Teaching
Institute Faculty Fellow, recognized as one of the “nation’s rising
leaders in engineering education.” He won an American Society
of Engineering Education (ASEE) Outstanding Teaching Award in
2001 for the Illinois/Indiana section.
He is the co-author with Robert Dueck of three textbooks: Digital
Electronics, Introduction to Digital Design, and Lab Manual to Accompany Introduction to Digital Design. He also collaborated with
Dueck on eResource CD ROM and Internet-based Text Companion, “Digital Design with CPLD Applications and VHDL.”
In the area of service he is currently on the Technology Student
Association’s Board of Directors, and vice president of the Solid
Rock International Board of Directors.
Reid earned his bachelor’s degree in computer and electrical
engineering from Purdue University in 1988, his master’s in electrical engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1994,
and his doctorate in engineering education from Purdue University
in 2009.
Donna Riley joins Virginia Tech after serving this past academic year as the National
Science Foundation Program Director for
Engineering Education. Riley served at NSF
while on leave from her position as associate
professor at Smith College’s Picker Engineering Program. The Picker program combines
the study of engineering with the humanities,
the arts, and the sciences.
When Riley joined the Picker program as a
RILEY
founding faculty member in 2001 she was appointed in the environmental science and policy program. By the
time she was promoted to associate professor in 2007, she held
appointments in the study of women and gender program and the
ethics program.
From 2000 until 2001 she held a science and technology policy
fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of
Science at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. From 1998
until 2000 she was the Clayton postdoctoral fellow in industrial
ecology at Princeton University.
Among her honors and awards, Riley presented a 2013 Distinguished Lecture at the American Society of Engineering Education
(ASEE) annual meeting, entitled “Rigor/Us: merit standards and
diversity in engineering education research and practice.” Riley
received a 2005 NSF CAREER award on critical pedagogies in
engineering education.
In teaching excellence, Riley received the 2012 Sterling Olmsted
award from ASEE’s Liberal Education/Engineering and Society
Division for “distinguished contributions to the development and
teaching of liberal arts in engineering education.” She won the
2010 National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and
Technical Professionals Educator of the Year award.
She is the author of two books, Engineering Thermodynamics
and 21st Century Energy Problems and Engineering and Social
Justice. She is the co-editor of a third, a collection of essays entitled Engineering and Social Justice: In the University and Beyond.
She has some 20 refereed journal articles, 35 refereed conference
proceedings, and 11 book chapters.
Since 2012, Riley has served as the deputy editor of the Journal
of Engineering Education, and since 2008 she has served as the
associate editor of Engineering Studies. She is a founding member
of the editorial team of the International Journal of Engineering,
Social Justice and Peace.
Riley earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in
1993 from Princeton University, and her master’s and doctoral
degrees in engineering and public policy from Carnegie Mellon
University in 1995 and in 1998, respectively.
ENGINEERING SCIENCE AND MECHANICS
Jonathan B. Boreyko received a bachelor’s
degree in physics and in mechanical engineering, both with honors, from Trinity College,
Hartford, Connecticut, in 2007. He went on to
Duke University where he obtained his doctorate in mechanical engineering and materials
science in 2012.
Since receiving his doctorate, he has held
two positions. Since 2012 he has worked as a
postdoctoral research associate at Oak Ridge
BOREYKO
National Laboratory’s Center for Nanophase
Materials Sciences. The center awarded him its 2013 postdoc
achievement award. Since 2013 he has also been employed as
a research scientist at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville’s
Bredesen Center.
Boreyko plans to develop a research group focused on the
theme of bioinspired fluidic systems. In nature, organisms feature
ingenious combinations of topology, surface chemistry, and biomaterials to exploit the transportation and phase-change of fluids. His
research will draw inspiration from natural phenomena to engineer
systems for applications ranging from anti-icing to synthetic biology
to desalination.
His teaching interests will focus on linking scientific phenomena
to everyday experiences by utilizing a dynamic combination of
in-class demonstrations, videos, and anecdotal discussions. He
teaching will use first principles as often as possible, challenging
students to rigorously understand the origin of equations from the
conservation of mass, momentum, and energy. He encourages
students to have an intuitive understanding of the system to more
naturally derive and exploit the relevant governing equations.
Boreyko is the author of over 10 archival journal articles including ones published in Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science of the United States of America, Physical Review Letters,
ACS Nano, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society. His
work has been featured by The New York Times, Discovery Channel (Canada), and Science magazine. He has been a national
finalist on the Collegiate Inventors Competition and was a winner
of the 2009 Gallery of Fluid Motion competition.
He is the co-holder of one patent on a thermal diode device, and
has another patent pending on a reversible, on-demand generation of aqueous two-phase microdroplets.
INDUSTRIAL AND SYSTEMS
ENGINEERING
CHEN
Xi Chen earned her bachelor’s degree in automation from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China in 2006.
She obtained her master’s degree in industrial
and systems engineering from North Carolina
State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, in
2008. Her doctoral degree in industrial engineering and management science (IEMS) was
awarded by Northwestern University in 2012.
Chen’s research interests are in stochastic modeling and simulation, applied probability and statistics, computer experimental
design and analysis, and simulation optimization.
Since obtaining her doctorate she has worked as an assistant
professor in the department of statistical sciences and operations
research at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Richmond,
Virginia. Her recent research has been focusing on experimental
design for building stochastic kriging metamodels for steady-state
simulation versus transient simulation; building better metamodels
for uncertainty quantification and risk management; and efficient
sequential experimental designs for stochastic kriging.
Stochastic kriging is a metamodeling methodology developed
for stochastic simulation experiments; it is based on the highly
successful kriging method for the design and analysis of computer
experiments — a popular engineering design tool that rapidly
predicts the response at any point in the design space based on
a limited number of computer simulation runs at a set of selected
design points. Stochastic kriging distinguishes itself by handling
the uncertainty about the performance response surface and the
sampling uncertainty inherent in the stochastic simulation simultaneously; it facilitates adaptive, sequential experiment designs that
systematically reduce both model and sampling uncertainty to a
user-specified level.
At VCU, Chen focused her teaching on introductory and advanced level graduate and undergraduate courses in stochastic
modeling and simulation methodology, applied probability, and
stochastic processes.
Chen was a summer intern at the IBM T.J. Watson Research
Center, Yorktown Heights, New York in the summer of 2010. She
conducted a research project on real-time pricing of electricity. She
established statistical models to describe the relationship between
real-time price, weather factors, and electricity usage of the residential customers’ data from the Olympic Peninsula Project. She
also used time-series dynamic regression to obtain price elasticities of electricity demand and the usage patterns of residential
customers, and to investigate the impacts of weather factors on
electricity demand.
Among her honors, Chen received the 2013 Nemhauser Dissertation Prize from the IEMS at Northwestern University.
Chen is a member of the INFORMS Simulation Society, INFORMS Computing Society, and Applied Probability Society. She
is also a member of ACM SIGSIM, the Society of Industrial and
Applied Mathematics, and the National Geographical Society.
Nathan Ka Ching Lau has spent the past two
years as a senior scientist at the University of
Virginia, Charlottesville.
His responsibilities in its department of
systems and information engineering included:
concept of operations and display design
research in cyber-security for a remotely
piloted aircrafts operations center; hardwareand human-in-the-loop research program for
nuclear process control, based in the Center
LAU
for Advanced Engineering and Research; efficiency investigation of the manufacturing and repairing processes
of jet engine turbine blades; development of a driver distraction
alert system using motion capture and sonification technology in
collaboration with the UVA Behavioral Medicine Center; usability
and evaluation study for an artificial pancreas in collaboration with
UVA’s Center for Diabetes Technology.
Previously Lau was a post doctoral fellow for a year at the
University of Toronto, Canada’s Department of Mechanical and
Industrial Engineering’s Human Factors and Applied Statistical Laboratory. He led a research project to investigate auditory
displays for tele-operating the lunar rover. He also co-authored
a grant of $850,000 (Canadian money) for a three-year driving
research project.
Lau is a reviewer for three groups: the Association for Computing Machinery Computing Surveys, the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers Transactions on Human-Machine Systems,
and the Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
He also reviews conference papers for the annual meetings of the
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of which he is a member.
In 2012 he was the session chair for the 8th International Topical
Meeting on Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human
Machine Interface Technologies.
As a student, he received several honors, including the 1999
Governor’s General Medal for the top academic student from the
Governor General of Canada. He also received an undergraduate
student research award for research potential in 2004 from the
Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of
Canada. From 2008 until 2010, he held an Alexander Graham Bell
Canada Graduate Scholarship for top-ranked graduate students,
also from the NSERC.
He is currently co-advising two doctoral and one master’s degree candidates.
Diego Moran earned his doctorate in operations research in the summer of 2014 from
the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and
Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Previously he attended the Universidad de Chile,
earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering
sciences in 2008, a mathematical engineer
degree (equivalent to a master’s degree in the
U.S.) in 2009, and a master of science degree
in operations management in 2009.
MORAN
His main research interest is optimization
with a focus on theory and applications of mixed-integer programming (MIP).
As a graduate research assistant at Georgia Tech, Moran, working with his adviser Santanu S. Dey, extended several fundamental results from the theory of linear MIPs to the case of general
convex MIPs. In particular, they proved an extension of Meyer’s
fundamental theorem of integer programming, finding some sufficient and necessary conditions for the convex hull of integer points
in general convex sets to be polyhedral.
At the Universidad de Chile, he and his advisers developed
a MIP optimization model for production planning in the salmon
industry.
Moran was a summer intern at the IBM Thomas J. Watson
Research Center in 2012. Working with Sanjeeb Dash and Oktay
Gunluk, they studied some theoretical properties of cutting planes
for MIPs.
He already has four peer-reviewed journal articles and two peer
reviewed conference proceeding articles.
Among his awards, he held a 2013 ARC Student Fellowship
awarded by the Algorithms and Randomness Center at Georgia
Tech. In 2012, he won the INFORMS Optimization Society Student
Paper Prize and the MIP Best poster competition. In 2009 his team
won the Kimberly Clark Corporation Optimization Contest, beating
out 23 other teams from universities throughout Latin America. In
2001, he recorded the nationwide highest score in the university
admission test, achieving a perfect score in the advanced mathematics section of the test. He is a reviewer for the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics and INFORMS Journal on Computing. He is a member of
INFORMS and of the organizing committee of the ISyE DOS
Optimization Seminars.
MATERIALS SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
For the past four and a half years, Johan Foster has served as the head of the Advanced
Materials Group at the University of Fribourg’s
Adolphe Merkle Institute (AMI) in Switzerland.
His general research expertise is in advanced functional and soft (nano) materials.
He works on the design, synthesis and engineering of bio-inspired, bio-sourced functional
polymers, supramolecular materials, and
nanocomposites. Many of his projects focus
FOSTER
on stimuli-responsive materials, biomedical
materials and utilizing a combination of covalent and non-covalent
interactions to create structured smart materials.
Prior to his AMI position, Foster was a postdoctoral research
fellow with Bert Meijer at the Eindhoven University of Technology’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry in The
Netherlands.
Foster attended Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Canada,
where he received his undergraduate degree in chemistry in 2002
and his doctorate, also in chemistry, in 2006.
During his academic career, Foster currently has 45 publications including 33 peer reviewed articles, three filed patents, three
co-authorships of book chapters, and six conference proceedings.
He has 500 plus citations with an H factor of 12. The Journal of the
American Chemical Society and the Journal of Polymer Science,
Part A have highlighted his work as cover topics.
He has acted as a session chair at several international symposia. He is a co-organizer of an ACS POLY session at the upcoming
2015 ACS 249th National Meeting’s Symposium on “Smart Materials.” Foster is a member of the Fribourg Materials Society, Canadian Society for Chemistry, American Chemical Society (ACS), ACS
Division of Polymer Chemistry, Swiss Chemical Society, Fribourg
Innovation Club, and the technical Aspects of the Pulp and Paper
Industry: Nanotechnology Division.
At AMI, Foster was an instructor for four graduate classes: nanoscience, polymer chemistry, concepts in supramolecular chemistry,
and polymer science properties and experimental techniques. He
was also an instructor and a teaching assistant at SFU.
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
Reza Mirzaeifar has enjoyed the past year
as a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of
Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics
(LAMM).
Previously, he received his doctorate in
mechanical engineering (ME) from Georgia
Tech in 2013. He earned his master’s degree
in ME from Tehran Polytechnic Institute, Iran,
MIRZAEIFAR
in 2006, and his undergraduate degree in ME
from Bahonar University of Kerman, Iran, in 2004.
His major research topics are: computational and experimental
mechanics, multi-scale analysis, bio-inspired design of materials, mechanics of biological materials, natural hazards mitigation,
shape memory alloys, martensitic phase transformation, micro-mechanical modeling of polycrystalline alloys, finite element method,
Eigen-derivative solutions, buckling analysis, functionally graded
materials, piezoelectrics, active control, optimization, and impact
mechanics.
He is the co-author of one book chapter, Mathematical modeling
and simulation, in Shape Memory Alloy Actuators: Modeling, Simulation, and Control, published by John Wiley. He also co-authored
the book Simulation of Advanced Finite Element Problems using
ABAQUS. He has some two dozen journal papers and 27 conference papers.
His honors include the top 25 most cited articles of Mechanics of
Materials since 2009. He made Science Direct Top 25 Hottest Articles in 2010 and in 2011. In 2008, Smart Materials and Structures
ranked his work as among the most downloaded papers. That
same year the Journal of Composite Materials cited him for the
most frequently read articles.
As a graduate student he held the first ranking in the master’s
degree program at Tehran Polytechnic Institute.
He is a reviewer for: Mechanics of Materials, Smart Materials
and Structures, Journal of Alloys and Compounds, International
Journal of Mechanical Sciences, European Journal of MechanicsA/Solids, International Journal of Pressure Vessels and Piping,
Shock and Vibration, Engineering Structures, Journal of Intelligent
Material Systems and Structures, Journal of Materials Engineering
and Performance, Materials, International Journal of Smart and
Nano Materials, Journal of Engineering Manufacture, and Smart
Materials Research.
He is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of
Aeronautics and Astronautics, Society of Engineering Science, and
the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.
When Rui Qiao received his doctorate in
mechanical engineering (ME) in 2004 from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he
remained with the university as a postdoctoral
research associate for another year.
In 2005, Clemson University recruited him
to its ME faculty as an assistant professor. In
2011 he was promoted to associate professor
with tenure. Since 2009 he also spent each
summer as a faculty visitor at the Oak Ridge
QIAO
National Laboratory. He also spent April of
2013 as a faculty visitor at Imperial College of London’s Department of Chemistry.
At Clemson, Qiao directed the Laboratory of Transport Phenomena for Advanced Technologies. The lab’s research focused
on challenges emerging at the frontiers of advanced technologies
such as electrical energy storage, thermal management, biomanufacturing, and lab-on-a-chip.
His recent research interests are in: thermodynamics and ionic
transport in electrical energy storage systems such as supercapacitors; particulate transport and phase-change heat transfer;
multiphase flows and fluid-structure interactions in emerging biomanufacturing technologies; and interfacial electrohydrodynamics
and its applications in micro/nanofluidic systems.
His teaching interests are in fluid mechanics, thermodynamics,
heat transfer, micro/nanofluidics, and computational methods.
Qiao has a host of National Science Foundation grants with his
share at $1.55 million of the total of $2.4 million.
He recently started a two-year stint on the editorial board of
Scientific Reports by Nature Publishing group. He is a co-author
of two book chapters: “Modern theories of carbon based electrochemical capacitors” in Electrochemical Capacitors: Materials,
Systems and Applications, and “Structure of the electrical double
layers: insights from continuum and atomistic simulations,” in Computational Bioengineering. He has 45 refereed journal papers with
an H-index of 24.
Among his honors, he received the 2012 Eastman Chemical
Award for Excellence in Research and Teaching from Clemson
University’s ME Department. In 2009 the department awarded him
its Eugene H. Bishop Award for Excellence in Teaching and its Ken
Roby Undergraduate Advising Award.
Qiao received his bachelor’s degree in power engineering from
Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 1996.
In 1999 he earned his master’s degree in thermal engineering from
Tsinghua University, China.
Zhiting Tian joins the Virginia Tech faculty
immediately after receiving her doctorate in
mechanical engineering (ME) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Advised
by Gang Chen, the Carl Richard Soderberg
Professor of Power Engineering and the ME
department head, she defended her dissertation, “Exploring heat transfer at the atomistic
level for thermal energy conversion and management” in May 2014.
TIAN
Tian holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, graduating in
the top five percent of her class in 2007. She attended the State
University of New York at Binghamton for her master’s degree in
ME, received in 2009.
Among her honors, she was the recipient of the 2014 Wunsch
Foundation Silent Hoist and Crane Award for academic excellence.
She was named an MIT Graduate Woman of Excellence in 2013
for her leadership and outstanding accomplishments. She received
the Keck Travel Award in Thermal Sciences in 2012. In 2010 she
received a third place, selected from more than 200 posters, in
the Best Paper Competition at the American Society of Mechanical Engineering’s Society-Wide Micro/Nano Technology Forum,
ASME International Conference and Exhibition, Vancouver, British
Columbia, Canada.
At MIT, Tian was a research assistant since 2009. She investigated: phonon transport in alloy systems using inelastic X-ray
scattering at the advanced photon source facility at Argonne
National Laboratory; measured interfacial thermal transport with
self-assembly using ultrafast optical techniques; examined phonon
transmission across single interfaces and superlattices using
Green’s function; studied thermal and electronic transport properties of thermoelectric materials via first-principles density functional
theory (DFT) calculations; evaluated the importance of optical
phonons in nanostructures based on first principles calculations;
detailed the spectral phonon transport properties via molecular
dynamics (MD) simulations.
She has experience as a teaching assistant in the graduate
level MIT course, direct solar/thermal to electrical energy conversion technologies. She also served as a TA in two undergraduate
courses at Binghamton University: fluid mechanics and thermodynamics.
She is the co-author of 14 journal articles, and co-author of one
book chapter with Chen. The chapter, “A comprehensive review of
heat transfer on thermoelectric materials and devices,” appears in
the 2014 edition of the Annual Review of Heat Transfer.
She is or has been a reviewer for: Nano Letters, Applied Physics
Letters, Journal of Applied Physics, Physical Review B, Annual Review of Heat Transfer, Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, the
Journal of Physical Chemistry, Journal of Alloys and Compounds,
International Journal of Thermal Sciences, Frontiers of Physics,
2013 ASME Summer Heat Transfer Conference, the 2013 and
2014 ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and
Exposition. She was the session chair of the 2013 ASME Summer Heat Transfer Conference, Session 3-2-3 Instrumentation and
Measurement Techniques.
Lei Zuo is a three-time graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), earning
two master’s degrees in 2002. They were in
mechanical engineering (ME) and in electrical
engineering. He received his doctorate in ME
from MIT in 2005. His undergraduate degree
was in automotive engineering, received from
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1997.
In November of 2004 Zuo became a senior
research scientist at Abbott Laboratories, North
ZUO
Chicago, Illinois. In January of 2008 he was
promoted to associate research investigator.
In September of 2008 the State University of New York at Stony
Brook hired him as an assistant professor in its ME department.
He was awarded an early tenure and promotion to associate professor in October of 2013.
At Stony Brook, Zuo founded and directed the Energy Harvesting and Mechatronics Research Laboratory. His research interests
are in energy harvesting, smart materials and structures, vibration
control, vehicle engineering, mechatronic system design, thermoelectric materials and applications, and advanced sensors.
Since 2008 he has secured $5.26 million in research funding
with $4.56 as the principal investigator from federal and state
agencies and industry, including the National Science Foundation,
Department of Energy, Office of Naval Research, Department of
Transportation, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Among his honors, Zuo won the 2014 Best Paper Award in
Structures and Structural Dynamics from the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers’ (ASME) Branch on Adaptive Structures and
Material Systems. He won the Society of Automotive Engineers’
Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award in 2014. In 2013 he received
two additional best paper awards. One was from the ASME Design
Engineering Division Vehicle Design Technical Committee and
the second one was from the ASME Design Engineering Division
Mechatronic and Embedded Systems and Application Technical
Committee.
Zuo is a 2014 P3 award winner of the EPA for his work on ocean
wave energy harvesting. The Energy Harvesting and Storage USA
2012 conference named Zuo the winner of the Best Application of
Energy Harvesting for his work on the mechanical motion rectifierbased railroad energy harvester. He won an R&D 100 award in
2011 from R&D Magazine for his energy harvesting shock absorbers. These annual awards are given to inventors of technologies
that the magazine believes are among the most significant technology innovations of the year in the world.
He has 31 journal papers and 70 conference papers. His name
appears on two granted patents and four patents pending.
He is an associate editor of the ASME Journal of Shock and
Vibration, a technical editor of IEEE/ASME Transaction on Mechatronics, and associate editor of Shock and Vibration. He is also on
the editorial boards of the ASME Dynamic Systems and Control
Conference and the American Control Conference.
SCHOOL OF BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING AND
SCIENCES
Steven Rowson has played an integral role
in the injury biomechanics program at Virginia
Tech since his arrival as a graduate student in
2006. Now, Rowson is joining the program as a
tenure track assistant professor.
Rowson earned his bachelor’s degree in
mechanical engineering (ME) from Rowan
University, Glassboro, New Jersey in 2006. In
2008 he received his master’s degree in biomedical engineering at Virginia Tech, focusing
ROWSON
his thesis on the impact biomechanics of the
head and neck in football.
Three years later he earned his doctorate with a thesis titled,
“Head acceleration experienced by man: exposure, tolerance, and
applications,” which developed the theoretical foundation of the
Virginia Tech Helmet Ratings™. The Brain Trauma Foundation recognized this work with its Science and Prevention award in 2011.
Since 2011 Rowson’s position with Virginia Tech was an assistant
research professor.
He is the co-author of a number of refereed journal publications that have helped lead to the alteration of the manufacturing
processes of helmet designers. These include “Can helmet design
reduce the risk of concussion in football,” in the Journal of Neurosurgery, and the “Effectiveness of helmets in the reduction of
sports-related concussion in youth,” in the Institute of Medicine.
In total, his name appears on 32 refereed journal articles and 10
refereed conference publications. His byline appears on another
44 conference publications. He is the co-author with Stefan Duma
of one book chapter, “The biomechanics of concussion: 60 years
of experimental research,” in Concussion in Athletics.
He is currently advising one Ph.D. student and one master’s student. He has taught senior design in ME, and has been a lecturer
for three courses: advanced impact biomechanics, injury physiology, and introduction to biomedical engineering.
He is a current journal paper reviewer for the following publications: Journal of Biomechanical Engineering; American Journal of
Sports Medicine; International Journal of Environmental Research
and Public Health; Sports Biomechanics; Accident Analysis and
Prevention; Experimental Techniques; Traffic Injury Prevention;
Journal of Mechanics in Medicine and Biology; Clinical Neurology
and Neurosurgery; Public Health; British Journal of Sports Medicine; Journal of Applied Biomechanics, and Annals of Biomedical
Engineering.
He is a member of ASTM International, Biomedical Engineering
Society, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Virginia Tech College of Engineering
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on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, veteran status,
national origin, religion, or political affiliation. Anyone having questions concerning
discrimination should contact the Office for Equity and Inclusion.