News Release
18 New Faculty Hires at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering in Fall 2019
San Diego, CA, October 9, 2019 -- The Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego welcomes 18 new faculty in 2019. The Jacobs School of Engineering hires faculty with clear-eyed determination, technical smarts, creativity, and the openness to collaborate across disciplines and industries.
Faculty come to the Jacobs School of Engineering to get things done. Educators. Researchers. Clinicians. Mentors. Inventors. Entrepreneurs.
“When I think of all the lives that will be inspired and improved by the work of our new faculty, I’m humbled. I’m also thrilled. WOW,” said Albert P. Pisano, Dean of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. (Download a PDF of the 2019 new faculty brochure.)
The Jacobs School ranks #3 in the nation among public engineering schools for research expenditures per faculty member, according to the US News rankings.
Read about the new Jacobs School of Engineering faculty below. View the 2019 new faculty brochure here as a PDF.
BIOENGINEERING
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LINGYAN SHI
Assistant Professor
Shi develops and applies optical imaging and spectroscopic techniques that can directly visualize complex biological events—such as those underlying brain function, cancer, and metabolic diseases—at subcellular scales in real time and in situ. Shi’s methods could offer researchers and clinicians powerful tools to diagnose and treat disease.
Previously Postdoctoral Research Associate, Columbia University
Ph.D. City College of New York
COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
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ALBERT CHERN
Assistant Professor
Chern studies the interplay among differential geometry, algebraic topology, differential equations, and computational mathematics. His work has resulted in successful and novel applications in fluid dynamics, geometry processing, as well as classical numerical PDE challenges such as absorbing boundary conditions in wave computations.
Previously Postdoctoral Researcher, Technische Universität Berlin
Ph.D. Caltech
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NADIA HENINGER
Associate Professor
Heninger’s research focuses on security, applied cryptography, and algorithms, with particular interest in cryptography in practice, cryptanalysis, privacy, computational number theory, and coding theory. She is best known for her work identifying widespread vulnerabilities in cryptographic keys on the Internet.
Previously Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Ph.D. Princeton University
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NIEMA MOSHIRI
Assistant Teaching Professor
Moshiri’s work focuses on the development of high-quality online educational materials (mostly in the form of Massive Adaptive Interactive Texts, or MAITs) for use by instructors in fl ipped classes as well as for integration into Massive Open Online Courses. Moshiri’s future research also will be centered on open computational problems in HIV epidemiology.
Previously Ph.D. Candidate, UC San Diego
Ph.D. UC San Diego
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PAT PANNUTO
Assistant Professor
Pannuto seeks to increase the reach of the digital world into the physical world. Their work identifies opportunities for systems based solutions that enable the study of broad classes of phenomena that were previously unable to be measured, such as fine-grained interaction behavior of social groups, in-body physiology, and country-scale estimates of power grid performance.
Previously Ph.D. Candidate, UC Berkeley
Ph.D. UC Berkeley
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GERALD SOOSAI RAJ
Assistant Teaching Professor
Gerald’s research aims to design and evaluate student-centered methods for teaching computer science to a diverse set of learners. He studies the impact of bilingual CS education on non-native English speakers; effectiveness of live-coding for teaching introductory programming; and bridging the gap between academia and industry.
Previously Ph.D. Candidate, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison
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JINGBO SHANG
Assistant Professor
Shang’s research focuses on developing data-driven text mining approaches with light human annotation efforts to transform massive text data into actionable knowledge. His research has been successfully applied to a wide spectrum of industries across different domains (e.g., biomedical & financial).
Joint hire with the UC San Diego Halıcıoglu Data Science Institute.
Previously Ph.D. Candidate, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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YIYING ZHANG
Assistant Professor
Zhang explores innovative ways to build software and hardware systems for the next generation of data centers. Apart from data-center systems, she also works on the intersection of computer systems and machine learning, security, and programming languages.
Previously Assistant Professor, Purdue University
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison
ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING
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HANH-PHUC LE
Assistant Professor
Le develops advanced electronic systems for mobile applications, data centers, ultrahigh performance IT systems, automotive devices, robots, wearables, and IoT devices. His approach focuses on co-optimizing performance, efficiency, and miniaturization of integrated power electronics, including on-chip components and power management units.
Previously Assistant Professor, University of Colorado Boulder
Ph.D. UC Berkeley
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EDWARD WANG
Assistant Professor
Wang develops contextually intelligent, continuous mobile health monitors to enable widespread, low-cost medical care outside the clinic. His work combines sensing, machine learning, and human-computer interaction. He collaborates closely with clinicians and health organizations to create solutions that can make real-world clinical impact.
Previously Ph.D. Candidate, University of Washington
Ph.D. University of Washington
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XIAOLONG WANG
Assistant Professor
Wang’s research focuses on computer vision and machine learning. He develops unsupervised learning and continuous learning algorithms for training deep neural networks on video data. His work aims to build AI systems with minimum human annotations for the understanding of objects, human activities, scenes, and interactions among them.
Previously Ph.D. Candidate, Carnegie Mellon University
Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon University
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PENGTAO XIE
Assistant Professor
Xie develops machine learning methodologies to improve healthcare and medicine, such as automatically generating diagnosis reports from medical images and measuring patient similarity for personalized treatment. On the theoretical side, he studies diversity promoting learning, latent space models, and large-scale distributed machine learning.
Previously Senior Director, Petuum Inc
Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon University
MECHANICAL AND AEROSPACE ENGINEERING
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MICHAEL R. DAVIDSON
Assistant Professor
Davidson studies the engineering implications and institutional conflicts inherent in deploying low-carbon energy at scale. His work combines power systems optimization, renewable resources assessment, and methods from the social sciences to create feasible pathways for infrastructure transitions.
Joint hire with UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy.
Previously Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School
Ph.D. MIT
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DAVID KAMENSKY
Assistant Professor
Kamensky’s work addresses a central challenge of computational mechanics, namely, the difficulty of translating realistic, geometrically-complex problems into computational models. His research aims to streamline – or even automate – computational mechanics, by developing more geometrically-flexible analysis methods.
Previously Postdoctoral Researcher, Brown University
Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin
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BORIS KRAMER
Assistant Professor
To enable—or accelerate—computationally expensive engineering tasks, Kramer develops and analyzes new methods and algorithms based on models that reduce computational complexity. His research contributions are in multifidelity and data-driven modeling, optimization and control, uncertainty quantification, reliability-based design and design under uncertainty, with a strong focus on fluid flows.
Previously Postdoctoral Researcher, MIT
Ph.D. Virginia Tech
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HUIHUI QI
Assistant Teaching Professor
Qi focuses on engineering education, especially project-based learning, multidisciplinary course design, the influence of assessment methods on students’ learning outcomes, freshmen engineering education and retention improvement, promoting diversity in engineering, and sustainable engineering education.
Previously Assistant Professor, Grand Valley State University
Ph.D. Rutgers University
NANOENGINEERING
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ALYSSA POWELL
Assistant Teaching Professor
Powell teaches core courses in chemical engineering and is developing new laboratory and biochemical engineering courses for chemical engineering students. Her research has focused on enzyme engineering and biopharmaceutical protein production.
Previously Lecturer, UC San Diego
Ph.D. Stanford University
STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING
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MACHEL MORRISON
Assistant Professor
Morrison’s research focuses on applying fundamental knowledge from material science and solid mechanics towards enhancing the resilience of civil infrastructure. At the core of his interests is the exploitation of the microstructure-sensitive mechanical properties of steels and other polycrystalline alloys used for mechanical or thermomechanical applications.
Previously Research Assistant Professor, North Carolina State University
Ph.D. North Carolina State University
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PAST NEW FACULTY HIRES STORIES
UC San Diego Engineering has Hired 90 Faculty over 5 years
Read the story / PDF of the 2018 faculty brochure
26 New Faculty Hired into the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering in Fall 2017
Read the story / PDF of new 2017 faculty brochure
13 New faculty focus on robotics, data and cybersecurity and more
Read the 2016 story / PDF of the 2016 brochure
17 new faculty join the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego in 2015
Read the 2015 story / PDF of the 2015 brochure
19 new faculty join the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego in 2014
Read the 2014 story / PDF of the 2014 brochure
Media Contacts
Daniel Kane
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-534-3262
dbkane@ucsd.edu