
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.

Sandra Batista
Assistant Teaching Professor of Computer Science
Sandra Batista joined UCLA Samueli in July 2024 as an assistant teaching professor of computer science. Most recently a visiting assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University, Batista is a double Bruin alumna and has nearly a decade of university teaching experience.
Batista’s research interests encompass the intersection of statistics, computer science and computational biology. In particular, Batista focuses on developing efficient statistical methods for improving large data sets in computational genetics with a focus on gene expression data and transcription factors.
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Prior to her tenure at Loyola Marymount, Batista was a project scientist in the computational biomedicine department at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She was a senior lecturer in computer science at USC and a lecturer at Princeton University, teaching courses on computer networks and bioinformatics. She also led research seminars on machine learning and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
As a capstone project mentor at Loyola Marymount, Batista was committed to improving student learning. She also served on the inaugural Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee for the Computer Science Department at USC. In 2016, she was a volunteer at the nonprofit Hispanics Inspiring Students’ Performance and Achievement Role Model Program.
Batista obtained her bachelor’s degree in computer science from Harvard University, followed by her master’s and doctorate degrees from UCLA in computer science, where she was advised by professor emerita Sheila Greibach. She was a postdoctoral research associate in computational genetics at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the mentorship of now-UCLA computer science professor Wei Wang. She was also a visiting scholar at Duke University.
Among her honors are an AT&T Labs Fellowship, an AT&T Engineering Scholarship, a National Institute of General Medical Sciences Fellowship in statistical genetics and genomics, and a California Department of Education certificate of recognition for her contributions to the department’s Innovating for Equity Summit.

Steven Chavez
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Steven Chavez joined UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering in July 2024.
His research interests are in photochemical engineering, focusing on plasmonics, photocatalysis and solar energy conversion technologies. His group will work at the interface of nanophotonics and heterogeneous catalysis to develop photocatalysts and photochemical conversion systems designed to help decarbonize chemical production processes.
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Prior to joining UCLA, Chavez was an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis. He obtained his doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where he received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, as well as the University of Michigan’s Rackham Merit Fellowship and Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship.
Chavez was recently identified as an Emerging Young Investigator by the Pacific Coast Catalysis Society and was invited to speak at the University of Washington’s Distinguished Young Scholars Seminar Series. He has also received the Janice Lumpkin Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the Richard J. Kokes Award from the North American Catalysis Society.
Along with his research interests, Chavez has enjoyed teaching, mentoring, as well as promoting equity, diversity and inclusion. He aims to inspire first-generation students —especially those from low-income households — to pursue science, technology, engineering and mathematics. He was recently recognized as a Stanford Postdoctoral DEI Champion for his work in this area. Chavez’s recruitment is part of UCLA Samueli’s Mentor Professor Program, an initiative to hire faculty with a demonstrated record of mentoring students from underrepresented and underserved populations.
Chavez received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from UC Berkeley with a concentration in materials science and an emphasis in solid-state physics. He spent a year as an undergraduate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis and a summer at MIT working on catalyst design. He also received UC Berkeley’s Most Outstanding Student Leader Award for his efforts as president of the school’s chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.

Yuchen Cui
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Yuchen Cui joined UCLA Samueli in July 2024 as an assistant professor of computer science. Prior to the appointment, she was a postdoctoral researcher with Stanford University’s Intelligent and Interactive Autonomous Systems Group.
Cui’s research focuses on the intersection of machine learning and human-robot interaction, specifically pertaining to home learning. She aims to build robots that can adapt to diverse task scenarios quickly and safely under the guidance of non-expert human teachers.
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Among the honors Cui has received are an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Rising Stars Award from the Georgia Institute of Technology, a Robotics Science and Systems Best Paper Finalist Award, and a graduate school professional development award from The University of Texas at Austin.
Cui obtained her bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Purdue University, followed by her doctorate from The University of Texas at Austin in computer science. Her dissertation focused on efficient algorithms for human-robot interaction, evaluating different methods of how nonexperts can teach robots tasks with minimal effort. During her graduate studies, she also completed software research internships with Facebook AI, Diligent Robotics and Honda Research Institute USA and served as a mentor for two undergraduate research programs.

Anushri Dixit
Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Anushri Dixit joined UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in July 2024, following a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University and a Ph.D. in control and dynamical systems from the California Institute of Technology.
Dixit’s research focuses on safety-critical planning, control theory, robotics and optimization. She aims to develop autonomous technologies for robots to operate safely and effectively under uncertain conditions and in complex, dynamic environments.
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At Caltech, her research focused on developing theory for risk-aware control and planning techniques for robots operating in uncertain and unstructured environments. She participated in a major collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other institutions for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Subterranean Challenge. As part of Team Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Resilient Robots, Dixit developed the robots’ planning motions over extreme terrain for search and rescue in GPS-denied underground environments.
Prior to joining UCLA, Dixit volunteered as a visiting scientist at the Caltech Center for Teaching, Learning, and Outreach, which offers hands-on science programs for area elementary schools. She also has extensive experience teaching and mentoring both undergraduate and graduate students, having worked as a teaching assistant and research program mentor at Caltech.
Dixit obtained her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her honors include a D.E. Shaw Zenith Fellowship, a Southern California Robotics Symposium Rising Star Award and a University of Chicago Rising Star in Data Science Award.

Vatsa Gandhi
Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Vatsa Gandhi will join UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in January 2025. He is currently an Ashby Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge in England.
Gandhi’s research centers on the mechanics of materials, specifically shock compression and dynamic behavior. More recently, Gandhi has been developing new techniques for in-situ material testing using X-rays to characterize the physics and fracture of shell-based architected solids. The research has applications in the development of high-performance, extremely durable materials — from optical components to spacecraft shielding — as well as in the scientific study of high-velocity impacts, such as meteorite collisions.
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In 2023, Gandhi was awarded the Best Oral Presentation Award at the American Physical Society’s Shock Compression of Condensed Matter Conference, and he won first place in the 2022 Michael Sutton International Student Paper Competition of the Society for Experimental Mechanics.
Gandhi received his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and his master’s and doctoral degrees in aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology. His doctoral thesis, focused on shock-induced phase transformations, was awarded the Caltech’s Donald Coles Prize for the best design of an experiment in aeronautics.

Liz Izhikevich
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Liz Izhikevich joined UCLA Samueli in July 2024 as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Izhikevich’s research focuses on improving the internet’s performance and security. This includes building systems that collect data about the behaviors of networks, users and attackers, and use quantitative analysis to find operational challenges.
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Among the honors Izhikevich has received are a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation, a graduate research fellowship in science and engineering from Stanford University, an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Rising Star Award from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and several awards honoring her community service and teaching.
In the last year of her doctoral program at Stanford, Izhikevich also was a research fellow at Netflix, where she worked in collaboration with SpaceX’s Starlink to improve satellite-internet streaming quality.
Izhikevich obtained her bachelor’s in computer science with a minor in mathematics and a master’s degree in computer science from UC San Diego. She also received a master’s and Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford.

Anya Jones
Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Anya Jones joined UCLA Samueli as a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in July 2024, following nearly 14 years on the aerospace engineering faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Jones’ research interests include the experimental fluid dynamics of unsteady and separated flows. Her research group, the Separated and Transient Aerodynamics Laboratory, focuses on understanding vortex dynamics and the physics of highly separated flows using a variety of methods, including water channels and wind tunnels. The group’s recent projects include studying the effects of extreme gust encounters on wing performance, rotorcraft flight through air wakes and other unsteady environments, the unsteady lift and drag associated with flapping wings, and wind- and water-turbine systems.
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Among the many honors Jones has received are a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2016 — the nation’s highest honor for scientists and engineers in the early stages of their careers, as well as an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
Jones has been a Fulbright Scholar at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Technical University Braunschweig in Germany. She has chaired multiple NATO Research and Technology Organization task groups on gust response and unsteady aerodynamics.
She received a dual bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering and mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in England.

Konstantinos Kallas
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Konstantinos Kallas will join UCLA Samueli in October 2024 as an assistant professor of computer science. Currently, Kallas is completing a doctorate in computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Kallas’ research interests are at the intersection of computer systems, compilers and programming languages, with the goal of building ultra-reliable, high-performance software systems with a broad range of practical applications. One system he has helped develop is PaSh — a pioneering optimization ecosystem supported by the Linux Foundation for boosting the speeds of programs that run in the Unix shell command-line environment by parallelizing them to run simultaneously on multiple computer processors. Another system Kallas worked on is Netherite — a highly optimized serverless function execution engine that runs in production on Azure, the cloud-computing platform developed by Microsoft.
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Among the awards Kallas has received are a best paper award at EuroSys 21 (the European Conference on Computer Systems) and a best presentation award at HotOS 21 (Hot Topics in Operating Systems). He also placed second at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2020-2021 Student Research Competition Grand Finals.
Kallas earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. His technical experience includes research internships at both Microsoft Research, where he worked on the stateful serverless paradigm, and Amazon Web Services, where he tackled the verification of critical code.

Di Luo
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Di Luo joined UCLA Samueli in July 2024 as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and is a member of the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering, which was created by UCLA Samueli and the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences.
Prior to the appointment, Luo was a fellow at the National Science Foundation-funded Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, which is affiliated with the Center for Theoretical Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Physics Department of Harvard University.
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Luo’s research explores areas in AI + Science (the intersection of artificial intelligence and science) and quantum computation. He focuses on developing machine learning and quantum algorithms for discoveries and advancements in science and engineering, as well as designing new theories and algorithms for AI and robotics inspired by mathematics and physics.
He received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he also received two master’s degrees in mathematics and physics, respectively. During his graduate studies, Luo held internships with Google Quantum AI, the Flatiron Institute in computational research in New York and the Vector Institute — a Canadian nonprofit research organization focused on artificial intelligence.
Luo was the recipient of a Charles P. Slichter Fellowship and an Excellence in Teaching Award from UIUC. He earned his bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from The University of Hong Kong.

Aditya Nandy
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Aditya Nandy will join UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering in July 2025. He is currently at the University of Chicago, pursuing postdoctoral studies in computational biophysics through the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, a program of Schmidt Futures.
Nandy’s research interests are in computational chemistry and computational biophysics, using physics-based modeling, machine learning and data science techniques to decipher the behavior of molecules, proteins and materials with ideal properties for a broad range of applications. He has authored 40 peer-reviewed published papers, including 11 as the first author.
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Before his current fellowship, Nandy received his doctorate in theoretical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his graduate studies, he was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and MIT’s Robert T. Haslam Presidential Graduate Fellowship. He also received the American Chemical Society’s Chemical Computing Group Excellence Award and the Richard J. Kokes Award from the North American Catalysis Society.
In addition to his research, Nandy has been recognized for his teaching at the MIT Department of Chemistry, where he received an award for outstanding teaching in 2018. He also has served as a mentor to undergraduate students from backgrounds underrepresented in engineering fields.
Nandy received his bachelor’s degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering, with a minor in chemistry, from UC Berkeley, where he was both a UC Regents’ Scholar and Leadership Award Scholar.

Hanrui Wang
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Hanrui Wang will join UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of computer science in November 2025.
Wang’s research focuses on machine learning, computer architecture and quantum computing. He aims to increase the synergy between AI and quantum computing by developing quantum computing applications and hardware-algorithm co-designs to enhance the efficiency and speed of AI computations, and by leveraging AI techniques to model and optimize quantum-computing systems for greater reliability and accuracy.
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Prior to joining UCLA, Wang earned his doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a member of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories and the Enabling Practical-scale Quantum Computing Expedition — a multi-institutional program funded by the National Science Foundation. He also helped develop and co-instructed a graduate-level course at MIT on efficient machine learning and systems, held internships with Nvidia Research and Xilinx Inc., and was a visiting scholar at The University of Chicago.
Wang has received a pair of rising star awards from the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in 2024 and the artificial intelligence consortium MLCommons in 2023, respectively. He has also garnered top honors at international academic conferences and technical competitions, including best paper awards at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Quantum Computing and Engineering Conference, and the Reinforcement Learning for Real Life Workshop hosted by the International Conference on Machine Learning.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering with honors from Fudan University in Shanghai.

Kyle Yoshida
Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Kyle Yoshida will join UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in July 2025. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Mechanically-Intelligent Autonomous Robotics Laboratory at Washington State University.
Yoshida’s research focuses on soft robotics, wearable technologies, haptic devices, human-robot interaction, device design and mechatronics. His recruitment was a part of UCLA’s Native American and Pacific Islander Bruins Rising Initiative, which aims to expand access to UCLA for members of these groups and to support their success and well-being on campus. He will also hold a faculty appointment with the UCLA American Indian Studies Center.
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Among his many honors and awards, Yoshida was recognized by the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) as a Sequoyah Fellow. He has also received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Yoshida earned his master’s and Ph.D. from Stanford University, where he was a member of the Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine Lab. In addition to his research on mobile tactile displays, which is the focus of his doctoral thesis, Yoshida collaborated with research groups from Rice University and Cornell University on haptics technologies.
For his undergraduate studies, Yoshida received his bachelor’s in engineering sciences from Harvard University, with a major in bioengineering on the mechanical track and a minor in African studies. He worked in the Harvard Biodesign Lab, where he developed image-processing algorithms for real-time tracking of leg-tendon movements.
In 2020, Yoshida founded Honua Scholars, a STEM-mentorship and professional development program in Hawaii. He currently serves as the executive director of the program, which has been recognized as one of the Top 10 Native STEM Enterprises to Watch by AISES.

Leo Zhou
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Leo Zhou will join UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in November 2024. Currently, Zhou is a DuBridge postdoctoral research associate in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.
Zhou’s research interests lie at the intersection of physics, math and computer science. In particular, he is interested in quantum information theory, mathematical optimization, computational complexity and many-body physics — the study of emergent physical properties of many interacting particles. He has worked on problems in quantum algorithms and architectures, quantum complexity theory, and practical quantum applications.
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At Caltech, Zhou held a Burke Prize fellowship and received the Outstanding Paper Award in 2022 at the 17th Conference on Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptology. He was also awarded a grant for an Excellent Contributed Talk at the QC40: Physics of Computation Conference, which was jointly organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IBM.
While pursuing his doctorate in physics at Harvard University, Zhou worked as an intern for Google Quantum AI. He was also a visiting researcher at Stanford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Zhou received his bachelor’s degree from MIT in physics and mathematics, with a minor in economics.
Since early 2023, Zhou has been an advisor to BlueQubit, a start-up quantum software company.