The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science welcomes 11 new faculty members in 2016-17 to a roster that includes 32 affiliated members of the National Academy of Engineering and more than 60 winners of the NSF Career Award. The school now has 175 ladder faculty, the most in its history.
Sam Emaminejad
Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering
Emaminejad’s research focus is to develop an ecosystem of integrated portable, wearable and in-vivo physiological and environmental monitoring platforms to enable personalized and precision medicine. Emaminejad received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He most recently held a joint postdoctoral scholar post with UC Berkeley and Stanford School of Medicine.
Timu Gallien
Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Gallien’s research examines evolving coastal hazards from climate change and urbanization using numerical modeling and high resolution field observations. Her research interests include urban coastal flood prediction, beach morphology, near-shore processes, remote sensing, and beach groundwater. Gallien received her Ph.D. from UC Irvine. Before joining UCLA, she was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.
Eran Halperin
Professor of Computer Science
Halperin’s research interests are in computational methods to analyze genetic data, in particular to improve the understanding of disease genetics. Halperin, who will also hold a faculty appointment in the David Geffen School of Medicine, joins UCLA from Tel-Aviv University, where also received his Ph.D. He is also a senior research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, which is affiliated with UC Berkeley.
Ximin He
Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
He’s research interests are in bio-inspired materials and systems; biomedical and environmental applications, energy applications and 3-D printing technologies. Her honors include the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He was a Gates Cambridge Trust Scholar at Cambridge University, where she received her Ph.D., and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. He joins UCLA from a tenure-track position at Arizona State University.
Lihua Jin
Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Lihua Jin’s research interests include the mechanics of soft materials, continuum mechanics and their applications in technologies, nanomechanics, and multiscale modeling. Jin was most recently a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, where she worked on modeling mechanical and electrical properties of stretchable carbon nanotube electrodes. She received her Ph.D. in engineering sciences from Harvard University.
Jonathan Kao
Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering
Kao’s research interests lie at the intersection of neuroengineering, neuroscience, and information systems engineering, in particular how to improve algorithms for neural prosthetics. Kao joins UCLA from Stanford University. His honors include a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and Stanford Engineering’s Terman Award for Scholastic Achievement.
Sanjay Mohanty
Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Mohanty studies physical, geochemical, and biological processes that affect contaminant removal in the subsurface soil. His goal is to use this knowledge to develop strategies to protect and manage land and water resources. Mohanty received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has held postdoctoral scholar posts at Stanford University and more recently at the University of Pennsylvania.
Tony Nowatzki
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Nowatzki’s research interests include hardware/software codesign, and architectural modeling and applications of mathematical optimization. Nowatzki has received a Google fellowship in computer architecture, and a distinguished paper award at the Programming Language Design and Implementation conference. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and will join UCLA in January.
Philippe Sautet
Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Sautet’s research interests are in computational catalysis, and has done pioneering work in the theory of heterogeneous catalysis. He joins UCLA from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France, where he was an exceptional class director of research at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). His numerous honors include the Pierre Sue Grand Prize and election to the French Academy of Sciences. He received his doctorate from Paris-Orsay University. He has supervised 24 Ph.D. students including seven now in academia, and 14 post-doctoral researchers.
Yizhou Sun
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Sun’s research interests are in mining information and social networks, and more generally data mining, machine learning, and network science. Her focus is on modeling novel problems and proposing scalable algorithms for real-world applications, such as academic databases, social media, and healthcare. Her honors include the NSF CAREER Award, Yahoo’s Academic Career Enhancement Award, and the ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award. Sun received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She joins UCLA from the faculty of Northeastern University.
George Varghese
Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science
Varghese’s research interests are in network verification and network algorithmics, where he has made pioneering contributions. He was most recently a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Varghese has previously been on the faculty of UC San Diego and Washington University in St. Louis. His honors include the IEEE Kobayashi Award for Computers and Communications and the SIGCOMM Lifetime Award. He is a Fellow of the ACM. Several of the algorithms he helped develop appear in commercial systems. He received his Ph.D. from MIT.