News Release
Jacobs School welcomes 27 new faculty
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The University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering is proud to introduce the 27 new professors hired in 2020 and 2021. These professors are among the nearly 140 faculty who have joined the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering in the last eight years.
These new faculty and the bold research they pursue will further the Jacobs School’s mission of leveraging engineering and computer science for the public good.
“It’s my great honor to welcome these engineers, computer scientists, educators and researchers to the Jacobs School of Engineering community,” said Albert P. Pisano, Dean of the Jacobs School. “We are a young, powerful school because we have added cohort after cohort of energetic, imaginative, bold new faculty. I am very much looking forward to seeing the impact they will make.”
These faculty join a school on the rise; the, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering jumped to the #9 spot in the influential U.S. News and World Report Rankings of Best Engineering Schools in March 2020, and twelve months later, despite the headwinds, held that position.
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| 2021 New Faculty PDF |
Jacobs School new faculty
BIOENGINEERING
Brian Aguado, Assistant Professor
Aguado’s goal is to develop precision biomaterials that enable the evaluation of a patient's unique biology to diagnose and treat a variety of health disorders as a function of sex, age, and/or ancestry. Specifically, Aguado aims to develop sex-specific biomaterial technologies to treat cardiovascular diseases, including aortic valve disease and heart failure.
Previously: Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Colorado at Boulder
Ph.D.: Northwestern University
Andrew Bartko, Professor of Practice
Bartko’s goal is to inspire, nurture, and sustain vibrant collaborations between UC San Diego’s microbiome experts and industry partners in the life science, nutrition, energy, information technology, clinical and healthcare industries. Specifically, Bartko aims to focus on creating and commercializing innovative technologies to accelerate microbiome discoveries and healthcare breakthroughs across academic and industry collaborations.
Previously: Research Leader, Battelle
Ph.D.: Georgia Institute of Technology
Bogdan Bintu, Assistant Professor
Bintu develops new microscopy tools that can simultaneously “see” thousands of DNA sequences, RNA molecules and proteins in individual cells. He uses these tools to understand how neurons specialize within the olfactory nervous system.
Previously: Ph.D. Candidate, Harvard University
Ph.D.: Harvard University
Benjamin Smarr, Assistant Professor
Smarr’s research focuses on time series analysis in biological systems, with an emphasis on practical information extraction for translational applications. His main project is TemPredict, which brings together wearable device data from 50K people with over 2 million daily symptom reports and is used to identify signs of COVID-19 onset, progression, and recovery.
Previously: Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Berkeley
Ph.D.: University of Washington
COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
Mai ElSherief, Assistant Teaching Professor
ElSherief uses computational and data science problems that model online social interactions to infer and understand online misuse behaviors and psychological well-being. Her other research interests include social computing, natural language processing, machine learning, and communication.
Previously: Postdoctoral Fellow, Georgia Institute of Technology
Ph.D.: UC Santa Barbara
Carlos Jensen, Associate Vice Chancellor, Educational Innovation
Jensen’s research lies at the intersection between usability and software engineering, with an emphasis on studying how Open Source communities operate and organize, and the tools and processes needed to make them more efficient. His recent work uses automated testing techniques to help developers improve the reliability of large and complex open source software.
Previously: Associate Dean, Oregon State University
Ph.D.: Georgia Institute of Technology
Tzu-Mao Li, Assistant Professor
Li connects classical computer graphics and image processing algorithms with modern data-driven methods to facilitate physical exploration. His work added 3D understanding to computer vision models; used data to improve camera imaging pipeline quality; and made light transport simulation faster by using information implicitly defined by rendering programs.
Previously: Postdoctoral Researcher, UC Berkeley and MIT
Ph.D.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Imani Munyaka, Assistant Professor
Munyaka is a human-centered computing researcher. Her research interests include public policy, information security, computer science education, educational technologies, voting technologies, cybersecurity and minorities in STEM. Her goal is to improve and alleviate the security and privacy concerns of those most vulnerable.
Previously: Ph.D. Candidate, University of Florida
Ph.D.: University of Florida
Kristen Vaccaro, Assistant Professor
Vaccaro focuses on how to design machine learning systems to give users a sense of agency and control. She found that some existing ways of providing control for social media can function as placebos, increasing user satisfaction even when they do not work. She will help develop systems to give users control and oversight, and ethical guidelines and policies.
Previously: Research assistant, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ph.D.: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Rose Yu, Assistant Professor
The goal of Yu’s research is to advance machine learning and enable interpretable, efficient and robust large-scale spatiotemporal reasoning. Her work has been successfully applied to solve challenging domain problems in sustainability, health and physical sciences.
Previously: Assistant professor, Northeastern University
Ph.D.: University of Southern California
ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING
Nick Antipa, Assistant Professor
Antipa’s research aims to develop design frameworks that merge optical models with algorithms, allowing optimization of both components and enabling the development of cutting-edge imaging and display systems. By considering both the hardware and digital domains, new computational optical systems emerge that extend capability beyond what is available.
Previously: Ph.D. Candidate, UC Berkeley
Ph.D.: UC Berkeley
Mingu Kang, Assistant Professor
Kang researches vertically-integrated VLSI information processing for machine learning and signal processing algorithms. His research focuses on energy- and latency-efficient integrated circuits, architectures and systems by leveraging novel computing paradigms including in-memory, in-sensor and neuromorphic computing with both CMOS and emerging devices.
Previously: Research Scientist, IBM Research
Ph.D: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Florian Meyer, Assistant Professor
Meyer researches statistical signal processing for navigation, mapping and multiobject tracking in applications including maritime situational awareness, autonomous driving, and indoor localization. He investigates efficient and scalable high-dimensional nonlinear estimation using graphical models where the number of states to be estimated may also be unknown.
Previously: Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate, MIT
Ph.D.: Vienna University of Technology
Karcher Morris, Assistant Teaching Professor
Morris’s teaching aims to embed project-based learning throughout the undergraduate electrical and computer engineering curriculum, complementing theoretical foundations. By connecting students with application-oriented coursework and industry-relevant challenges, Morris promotes an early engagement between students and their research/industry goals.
Previously: Ph.D. Candidate, UC San Diego
Ph.D.: UC San Diego
Yuanyuan Shi, Assistant Professor
Shi's research interests are in the area of energy systems and cyber-physical systems, spanning from machine learning to optimization and control. She works on data-driven control for complex networked systems and market mechanism design under multi-agent learning dynamics.
Previously: Postdoctoral Researcher, Caltech
Ph.D: University of Washington
Yatish Turakhia, Assistant Professor
Turakhia develops algorithms and hardware accelerators to enable faster and cheaper progress in biology and medicine. He also develops computational methods that enable biological discoveries, such as new genotype-phenotype relationships.
Previously: Postdoctoral Researcher, UC Santa Cruz
Ph.D.: Stanford University
Yang Zheng, Assistant Professor
Zheng develops methods and frameworks for the optimization and control of network systems and their applications to cyber-physical systems, especially autonomous vehicles and traffic systems. His goal is to develop computationally efficient and distributed solutions for large-scale network systems by exploring and exploiting real-world system structures.
Previously: Postdoctoral Researcher, Harvard
Ph.D.: University of Oxford
MECHANICAL AND AEROSPACE ENGINEERING
Sylvia Herbert, Assistant Professor
Herbert focuses on developing new techniques for safety and efficiency in autonomous systems. She has developed methods for scalable safety and real-time decision making that draw from control theory, cognitive science and reinforcement learning, which are backed by both rigorous theory and physical testing on robotic platforms.
Previously: Graduate Researcher, UC Berkeley
Ph.D.: UC Berkeley
Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, Assistant Professor
Hidalgo-Gonzalez focuses on high penetration of renewable energy using optimization, control theory and ML. She co-developed a power system expansion model for Western North America’s grid under climate change uncertainty. She is interested in power dynamics, energy policy, electricity market redesign, and learning for dynamical systems with safety guarantees.
Previously: Ph.D. Candidate, UC Berkeley
Ph.D: UC Berkeley
Stephanie Lindsey, Assistant Professor
Lindsey’s work lies at the interface of fluid mechanics, numerical analysis and cardiovascular developmental biology. She seeks to determine causal-effect relationships for the creation of cardiac malformations and address important challenges in clinical treatment of congenital heart defects through a combined computational-experimental approach.
Previously: Postdoctoral Researcher, Stanford University
Ph.D.: Cornell University
Marko Lubarda, Assistant Teaching Professor
Lubarda is dedicated to engineering pedagogy and enriching students' learning experiences through curriculum design, teaching innovations and support of undergraduate student research. He works in the areas of computational analysis, engineering mathematics, materials science, solid mechanics, device physics, and magnetic nanotechnologies.
Previously: Assistant Professor, University of Donja Gorica, Montenegro
Ph.D.: UC San Diego
Lonnie Petersen, Assistant Professor
Dr. Petersen is a physician scientist specializing in space and aviation physiology and development of countermeasure devices for use in space. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she co-lead a team that developed a low-cost, easy-to-use ventilator and other ways to support critically ill COVID19 patients and mitigate the spread of disease.
Previously: Postdoctoral Researcher, UC San Diego School of Medicine
Ph.D.: University of Copenhagen
Lisa Poulikakos, Assistant Professor
Poulikakos harnesses nanophotonics, the study and manipulation of light on the nanoscale, to bridge engineering and biomedicine. The resulting in-vivo and ex-vivo nanophotonic probes aim to elucidate the origin and propagation of a range of diseases, leading to low-cost medical diagnostics; rapid, on-chip biochemical drug testing; or in-situ biomedical imaging.
Previously: Postdoctoral Researcher, Stanford University
Ph.D.: ETH Zurich
Aaron Rosengren, Assistant Professor
Rosengren conducts fundamental and applied research in astrodynamics, space situational awareness and space traffic management to define perennial, ad-hoc practices and policies to make space a sustainable resource. His contributions are in the fields of celestial mechanics and nonlinear dynamics, with a strong focus on space debris and small Solar-System bodies.
Previously: Assistant Professor, University of Arizona
Ph.D.: University of Colorado, Boulder
Jon Wade, Professor of Practice
Wade’s objective is to ensure that the research conducted and the curriculum developed in systems engineering has the greatest impact on addressing the critical challenges that face our global society and nation. He leads research in the area of complex, evolving systems engineering methods, processes, tools, and education.
Previously: Research Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology
Ph.D: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
NANOENGINEERING
Zeinab Jahed, Assistant Professor
Jahed designs electronics that integrate intelligently with biological systems at the nanoscale. She designs non-invasive and high-throughput bio-electronic tools to record and manipulate biological activities and uses AI and ML techniques to interpret the large data sets from these nano-bio-electronic tools to answer important biological questions.
Previously: Postdoctoral Researcher, Stanford University
Ph.D.: UC Berkeley
STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING
Georgios Tsampras, Assistant Professor
Tsampras’ research goal is to improve the seismic response and simplify the lifetime management of structures and civil infrastructures. He conducts integrated experimental and analytical research on components, connections, and systems that enhance the safety and reliability of structures and civil infrastructures against earthquakes.
Previously: Falcon Vehicle Structures Engineer, SpaceX
Ph.D.: Lehigh University
ANTHROPOLOGY, PERFORMANCE, and TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM
Hortense Gerardo, Director
The Anthropology, Performance, and Technology (APT) program at the Jacobs School of Engineering aims to empower a new generation of socially-engaged, culturally relevant, and artistically as well as scientifically and technically creative engineers. Gerardo, a playwright with a PhD in anthropology and performance studies, directs the program.
Previously: Associate Professor of Anthropology and Performing Arts, Lassell College
Ph.D.: Boston University
Media Contacts
Daniel Kane
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-534-3262
dbkane@ucsd.edu