New faculty artwork  2023
The UCLA Samueli School of Engineering is proud to welcome the following new faculty members. They bring expertise across a broad range of fields critical to the 21st century and will enhance the research, teaching and service mission of UCLA.
Elaheh Ahmadi

Elaheh Ahmadi
Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Elaheh Ahmadi joined UCLA Samueli in July as an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Ahmadi’s research explores the fabrication and characterization of nitride-based and oxide-based semiconductor materials and devices for high-power and high-frequency electronics, microelectromechanical and optoelectronics applications. Such next-generation materials and devices could improve energy efficiency across a range of technologies, including 5G and beyond-wireless communications, internet-of-things devices, autonomous electric vehicles, as well as being incorporated into larger systems, such as electric grids and mass transit systems.

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Before joining UCLA, Ahmadi has been an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering and applied physics at the University of Michigan since 2018. She has received many awards, including the Young Investigator Award in 2020 from both the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. In 2021, she received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award. Last year, she also received the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors Young Scientist Award.

Ahmadi was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara prior to her faculty appointment at the University of Michigan. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s in electrical engineering from the Sharif University of Technology in Iran. In 2015, she received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from UC Santa Barbara.

Idil Akin

Idil Akin
Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Idil Akin joined UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, effective July 1. She was previously an associate professor at North Carolina State University.

Akin’s research focuses on mechanisms that control how soils behave, including their physical, chemical, mechanical and hydraulic properties. Her current research projects, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), study how wildfires alter soils and affect hillside slope stability, and explore ways to improve design techniques for more sustainable geotechnical structures in extreme environments by examining how kangaroo rats construct resilient burrows in extreme desert environments.

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Prior to teaching at North Carolina State’s Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, Akin was an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Washington State University, where she was honored for outstanding research as a junior faculty member. She has also received a NSF CAREER Award and an American Society of Civil Engineers’ Excellence in Civil Engineering Education Teaching Fellowship. She has published papers in 20 journals, including 12 as first author.

Akin received her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and her master’s and doctoral degrees in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During her graduate studies, she received Wisconsin’s Norman H. Severson Geotechnical Award and was named a “Rising Star” by the Department of Civil Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Isabella Arzeno Soltero

Isabella Arzeno Soltero
Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Isabella Arzeno Soltero has joined the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering July 1 as an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. Her appointment is part of UCLA’s initiative to become a federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution by 2025, which includes hiring new faculty across the UCLA campus for individuals whose teaching, scholarship and/or mentoring has ties to Latinx experiences.

Arzeno Soltero has conducted extensive research on ocean dynamics across various scales, with a recent emphasis on the interplay between seaweed and hydrodynamics. Moving forward, her research will be dedicated to addressing vital aspects of coastal resilience, such as the dynamic processes that contribute to the formation of coastal hypoxic zones. This research is motivated by the significant impact these zones have on the health and well-being of nearby ecosystems and communities. Arzeno Soltero’s research methodology has centered on observational approaches, leveraging techniques such as scientific diving for instrument deployment.

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During her postdoctoral tenures at Stanford University (2022-2023) and UC Irvine (2020-2022), however, Arzeno Soltero expanded her research repertoire to include the development of numerical simulations. At Stanford, she began delving into the complexities of secondary circulation within kelp forest environments. Her objective was to illuminate the pivotal role played by kelp forests in the transport and dispersal of nutrients and larvae. At UC Irvine, Arzeno Soltero developed a model to estimate the global potential for seaweed cultivation, in order to assess the capacity of seaweed cultivation as a strategy for carbon dioxide removal.

Arzeno Soltero earned her doctorate in physical oceanography in 2020 from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, aided by funding from the National Defense Science and Engineering Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. Apart from being a teaching assistant at UC San Diego, she organized the Rosa Parks Tutoring Program designed to help promote diversity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields in communities facing economic and social challenges. She obtained both her master’s in civil and environmental engineering and bachelor’s in earth systems from Stanford University.

Since 2020, Arzeno Soltero has facilitated a community science program in Coachella Valley to study the water quality of the Salton Sea. She plans to continue research on the Salton Sea focused on the changing hydrodynamics, hydrogen sulfide emissions and the related socioeconomic impacts of this landlocked and highly saline body of water.

Alex Balandin

Alexander Balandin
Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering

Alexander Balandin joined UCLA Samueli as a distinguished professor in July 2023, following more than two decades on the faculty of UC Riverside, where he is a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering and a UC presidential chair professor of materials science. He previously served as the founding chair of UC Riverside’s Materials Science and Engineering Program and a director of the nanofabrication facility.

Balandin’s research expertise spans a broad range of fields including materials science, nanotechnology, electronics, phononics and optical spectroscopy. He is widely recognized for pioneering research into the thermal properties of graphene, which are sheets of carbon that are a single atom in thickness. His current research interests include low-dimensional quantum materials, charge-density-wave materials and their device applications, electronic noise, Brillouin-Mandelstam and Raman spectroscopy, and practical applications of graphene in thermal management.

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An internationally acclaimed researcher, Balandin has received many awards and recognitions including the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from the Department of Defense, the MRS Medal from the Materials Research Society, the Pioneer of Nanotechnology Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE) Society, the Brillouin Medal from the International Phononics Society. He is a fellow of the Materials Research Society, the American Physical Society, IEEE, the Optical Society of America, SPIE — the International Society for Optics and Photonics, the American Association for Advancement of Science and other professional societies. Since 2015, he has been recognized every year as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher and serves as the deputy editor-in-chief of Applied Physics Letters.

Balandin has advised 40 doctoral graduates who enjoy successful careers in leading technology companies, government laboratories and academia. He received a master’s degree in applied physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in Russia. He also obtained a second master’s and a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Xiaofan Cui

Xiaofan Cui
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Xiaofan Cui has been appointed as an electrical and computer engineering assistant professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, effective November 1.

Cui’s research combines concepts from circuits, control and systems to address challenges in power electronics-dominated energy systems including high-frequency and high-speed power converters, batteries, microgrids and renewable energy grids. Since 2022, he has been a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, where he is working on data-driven modeling, identification and prediction of energy storage systems. In particular, he is involved in a project funded by the United States Department of Defense to address the aging and health estimation of lithium-ion batteries.

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An alumnus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Cui received a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering, two master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering and mathematics, and a graduate certificate in data science. He also obtained two bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and economics, respectively, from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

While at the University of Michigan, Cui designed and contributed to various projects on power converters and energy storage systems funded by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). During his graduate studies, Cui interned at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, where he worked on operating inverter-based resources to stabilize the renewable energy power grid for a DOE-funded project.

In 2021, a committee of transportation industry experts, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs selected Cui as one of six Michigan Translational Research and Commercialization Program winners, awarding a team led by him a grant to turn one of his research projects into a real-world product. His hierarchical power-processing architecture enables retired batteries from electric vehicles to be repurposed for grid energy storage at a significantly lower cost.

As an instructor, Cui has mentored both undergraduate and graduate students. In 2021, he received a Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement in honor of his accomplishments in research, and contributions to teaching and service at the University of Michigan.

Cui has received many other awards and recognitions, including a Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant in 2020, a travel grant from the American Automatic Control Council in 2019 and a University of Michigan Graduate Student Fellowship in 2016. He has authored 10 journals — four as first author — and 16 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier conferences, including eight as first author.

Saadia Gabril

Saadia Gabriel
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Saadia Gabriel will join UCLA Samueli in July 2024 as an assistant professor. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Healthy ML (machine learning) group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and will start a data science faculty fellowship at the New York University this fall.

Gabriel’s research is in social commonsense reasoning and fairness in natural language processing, with a focus on qualifying the intent and factuality of human-written language. She aims to design models tailored to a person’s or computer’s underlying and overlying goals.

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Gabriel’s research is in social commonsense reasoning and fairness in natural language processing, with a focus on qualifying the intent and factuality of human-written language. She aims to design models tailored to a person’s or computer’s underlying and overlying goals.

Author of 11 publications including five as first author, Gabriel has held research internships with Microsoft; the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, Washington and SRI International in Menlo Park, California.

She received both her master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington, and a bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

Gabriel’s appointment is part of a UCLA-wide “Rising to the Challenge” initiative spearheaded by the Ralph J. Bunche Center and the Department of African American Studies to expand the scope and depth of scholarship that address racial equity issues. Announced in June 2020 by Chancellor Gene Block and then-Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Emily Carter, the program was established to help UCLA advance diversity, equity and inclusion. The plan includes recruiting 10 new faculty members over five years whose scholarly work addresses issues of Black experiences.

Eunice Jun

Eunice Jun
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Eunice Jun will join UCLA Samueli in November 2024 as an assistant professor from the University of Washington, where she received her doctorate and master’s in computer science and engineering.

Jun, who holds a bachelor’s degree in cognitive science and computer science from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, aims to make data more accessible by developing powerful analysis tools for individuals with little to no statistical or programming expertise. Her research combines ideas and techniques from human-computer interaction, programming languages, software engineering and statistics.

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Her accolades include a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the University of Washington’s Wilma Bradley Fellowship, a Barry Goldwater Scholarship Honorable Mention and being named a Rising Star in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has authored 14 publications, including eight as first author and three of which have received honors. Many have downloaded and used the software Tea and Tisane for data analysis, which she developed while pursuing her doctorate.

She has mentored two doctoral, two master’s, eight bachelor’s and two high school students in research. Jun has also volunteered for the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and held research internships with Microsoft’s Human Understanding and Empathy and Research in Software Engineering teams.

Jun’s appointment is part of the UCLA Samueli Mentor Professor Program, an initiative designed to hire faculty who are not only excellent in their fields but also have a demonstrated record of, or show exceptional promise for, mentorship of students from underrepresented and underserved populations.

Sam Kumar

Sam Kumar
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Sam Kumar will join UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor in July 2024. He is currently a doctoral student in computer science at UC Berkeley.

Kumar’s research interests lie in system security and networked systems. He is a member of two research groups — the cloud computing Sky Computing Lab and the Buildings, Energy and Transportation Systems research group. His efforts to develop open-source network applications include Transmission Control Protocol for low-power networks, which has been adopted in OpenThread — an open-source network stack used in smart home products. The protocol allows devices, regardless of their manufacturer, to connect to different networks (WiFi, Ethernet, 5G and LTE) with reliability, energy efficiency, security and extended range in mind.

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Author of 10 papers including five as lead author, Kumar’s publications have received multiple awards, including the 2022 Applied Networking Research Prize from the Internet Engineering Task Force/Internet Research Task Force. He is also a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Outside of his academic pursuits, Kumar has consulted for the nonprofit industry alliance Thread Group and has interned at Apple and Google.

In addition to his upcoming Ph.D., Kumar also received from UC Berkeley both his master’s degree in computer science and bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences.

Kumar’s appointment is part of the UCLA Samueli Mentor Professor Program, an initiative designed to hire faculty who are not only excellent in their fields but also have a demonstrated record of, or show exceptional promise for, mentorship of students from underrepresented and underserved populations.

Ian Roberts

Ian Roberts
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ian Roberts joined UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering July 1.

Roberts focuses his research on developing advanced techniques for next-generation wireless communication and sensing systems through the unique combination of theory and experimentation. He is actively working on problems related to millimeter-wave wireless systems; in-band, full-duplex satellite communication systems and related technologies that will be critical in delivering 5G and future 6G cellular networks.

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His research has made strides in transforming millimeter-wave communication systems, such as those in 5G, by upgrading them with in-band full-duplex capability — the long-sought ability to simultaneously transmit and receive signals at the same frequency. By combining theory with experimentation, Roberts has created novel techniques that have been validated using actual hardware. The advance will help to pave the way toward higher-throughput networks with lower latency and broader coverage to enable emerging applications, such as virtual reality and autonomous driving.

Roberts has held internship positions developing and implementing advanced wireless technologies at AT&T Labs, Amazon, startup GenXComm, Sandia National Laboratories and Dynetics. He has also visited Arizona State University and Yonsei University in South Korea on research collaborations. Roberts has co-authored 15 published research papers and conference proceedings. He also holds one U.S. patent and has co-authored a book chapter on next-generation transceivers for wireless communication.

Earlier this year, Roberts received the 2023 Andrea Goldsmith Young Scholars Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Communications Society for his contributions to the theory and practice of full-duplex millimeter-wave communications. He was presented with the award and delivered a talk this week at the IEEE Communication Theory Workshop in Taiwan.

Roberts received both his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow with the Wireless Networking and Communications Group. He earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Fabian Rosner

Fabian Rosner
Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Fabian Rosner will join UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering in November 2023. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Rosner’s broad research interests cover sustainable and renewable energy, energy storage, carbon capture and utilization, heat recovery and other systems for transferring and harnessing energy. He aims to help the energy and industrial sectors achieve zero emission by offering practical engineering solutions designed to preserve ecological balance and improve environmental justice. At Berkeley Lab, he is conducting techno-economic and lifecycle analyses of sustainable energy technologies, including innovative approaches to carbon capture and utilization.

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Among the honors Rosner has received is an appointment as a fellow with the Clean Energy Research Center for Water Energy Technologies — a consortium of U.S. and Chinese research organizations working toward low-carbon solutions to address climate change. He has authored 18 journal and conference publications, including 12 as first author.

Rosner received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from the Technical University of Munich in Germany. He obtained a second master’s and his doctorate in mechanical and aerospace engineering from UC Irvine, where he studied fuel cell hybrid systems at the water-energy nexus.

Daniel Schwalbe-Koda

Daniel Schwalbe-Koda
Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering

Daniel Schwalbe-Koda will join UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor in March 2024. He is currently a Lawrence Fellow Postdoctoral Researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

Schwalbe-Koda’s research interests are focused on expediting the discovery of new materials with desired properties, in particular for sustainable applications. His research combines high-performance computing and machine learning to design and synthesize new materials, with ongoing investigations of energy materials and new computational methods for their invention.

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He has also developed an open-source software to integrate materials simulation and predictive synthesis data. For example, he created a web platform to design synthesis routes for zeolites — an important class of nanoporous compounds used across a broad range of industrial processes. The materials discovered using Schwalbe-Koda’s tools balanced excellent catalytic properties with low cost in a field known for trial-and-error optimization.

Schwalbe-Koda received his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned a master’s in physics and a bachelor’s in electronics engineering, both from the Aeronautics Institute of Technology in Brazil. Recently named to Forbes’ 2023 “30-under-30” list of promising early career scientists, he has also received the Materials Research Society’s Graduate Student Gold Award, the MIT Presidential and Energy graduate fellowships and LLNL’s Lawrence Fellowship.

Jaimie Stewart

Jaimie Marie Stewart
Assistant Professor of Bioengineering

Jaimie Marie Stewart joined UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of bioengineering effective July 1. She is developing RNA technologies for molecular detection and regenerative medicine. Her research focuses on understanding and exploiting the structural and functional complexity of RNA to build RNA materials using principles of biophysics, chemistry and engineering.

Prior to her appointment she was a Life Sciences Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, where she worked on the design, synthesis and  characterization of DNA and RNA structures for the detection and separation of biomolecules.

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Stewart serves as the RNA Editor for the textbook Art of Molecular Programming and is a member of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee for Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science. She has received several awards and honors, including the 2019 Ford Postdoctoral fellowship and recognition as a fellow by the Intersections Science Fellows Symposium in 2021. She received her B.S. in bioengineering with a concentration in cell and tissue engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her Ph.D. in bioengineering from UC Riverside.

Stewart’s appointment is part of UCLA Samueli’s Mentor Professor Program, an initiative designed to hire faculty who are not only excellent in their fields but also have a demonstrated record of, or show exceptional promise for, mentorship of students from underrepresented and underserved populations.

Blaise Tine

Blaise-Pascal Tine
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Blaise-Pascal Tine joined UCLA Samueli July 1 as an assistant professor from the Georgia Institute of Technology where he earned his Ph.D. in computer science.

Tine’s research interests include high-performance computing, heterogeneous computer architectures, processors for autonomous systems and designing custom software-hardware accelerators for graphics rendering and machine learning. One of his major projects, Vortex, is an open-source, full-system graphics processing unit (GPU) framework that aims to streamline hardware accelerators research in graphics, graph analytics and machine learning. He has contributed to 14 publications, including 10 as first author. He also holds four U.S. patents on graphics and rendering technologies.

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Over the years, Tine has held research assistant positions at Intel Labs, Microsoft Research and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Most recently, he worked with the High-Performance Computing Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, where he focused on advancing graph neural networks for custom GPU accelerators.

Interested in democratizing scientific knowledge, Tine was an Intel Corporation GEM Fellow in 2016 as part of a national program to increase the participation of underrepresented groups in science and engineering.

Prior to his graduate studies, Tine spent 11 years with Microsoft — first as a software design engineer in Visual Studio, then as a senior software design engineer with Windows. He received his bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Clarkson University in New York and a certificate in game development from the University of Washington.

Tine’s appointment is part of a UCLA-wide “Rising to the Challenge” initiative spearheaded by the Ralph J. Bunche Center and the Department of African American Studies to expand the scope and depth of scholarship that address racial equity issues. Announced in June 2020 by Chancellor Gene Block and then-Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Emily Carter, the program was established to help UCLA advance diversity, equity and inclusion. The plan includes recruiting 10 new faculty members over five years whose scholarly work addresses issues of Black experiences.

Remy Wang

Remy Wang
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Remy Wang will join UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor in July 2024. He is currently a computer science and engineering doctoral student at the University of Washington.

Wang’s research focuses on optimizing data systems using advanced techniques in programming languages and database management. He has authored 10 papers, including four as first author. Among the many honors he has received from the Association for Computer Machinery are a best paper award at the 2022 Symposium on Principals of Database Systems, and distinguished paper awards in 2021 at the Principles of Programming Languages  conference and the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) conference, respectively.

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At University of Washington, Wang is a member of two research groups — the Programming Languages and Software Engineering group and the Database Group. He has also been active as a mentor to computer science undergraduate and master’s students.

In addition to his academic work, Wang has held research internships at RelationalAI in Berkeley, California; VMWare Research in Palo Alto, California and Aarhus University in Denmark. He received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Tufts University in Massachusetts.

Wang’s appointment is part of the UCLA Samueli Mentor Professor Program, an initiative designed to hire faculty who are not only excellent in their fields but also have a demonstrated record of, or show exceptional promise for, mentorship of students from underrepresented and underserved populations.