2020 Faculty Orientation

NEW FACULTY

O R I E N T A T I O N

let’s get to know each other

BIOENGINEERING

CHIH-WEN

CHU Dr. Chih-Wen Chu received her Bachelor’s degree in Zoology and MS in Molecular Medicine from the National Taiwan University in Taiwan, and she completed her PhD study in the lab of Hui Zou at the UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, TX, where she uncovered a post-translational modification of tubulin proteins that is critical for microtubule dynamics. She joined the lab of Sergei Sokol at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai for her postdoctoral studies and investigated the molecular mechanisms of planar cell polarity and apical constriction as well as their roles in the early development of Xenopus embryos.

KANG

KIM Dr. Kang Kim earned his bachelor’s in educational physics at Seoul National University, his master’s in physics at the University of Pierre & Marie Curie (Paris 6) in Paris, and then his doctorate in acoustics at Pennsylvania State University. After completing his PhD, Kang became a postdoctoral research fellow and then a member of the research faculty in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan. Before joining School of Engineering in 2020, Kang has been with School of Medicine since 2008 in the University of Pittsburgh. His research emphasis is on development and application of multi-modality imaging systems that are based on a fundamental understanding of how sound and light interact with soft tissues, and can characterize the structural, mechanical, compositional properties of tissues and organs and their underlying biological activities at the cellular level. Kang has been PI on eight NIH projects, one international collaborative project, and one corporate funded project. He has been Co-PI on one NIH and two NSF projects and also has served as Co-I for numerous NIH projects.

RAMAKRISHNA

MUKKAMALA Dr. Ramakrishna Mukkamala received graduate and post-doctoral training in bioelectrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was on the electrical and computer engineering faculty at Michigan State University for the past 18 years. Rama’s signal processing and sensing inventions for cardiovascular monitoring have been licensed to three companies. Last year, he received the MSU all-university innovation of the year award and an IEEE EMBS most impactful paper award for his cuff-less blood pressure measurement research. He is also a recipient of two teaching awards from MSU. Rama currently serves as the Vice Chair/ChairElect of the IEEE EMBS Technical Committee on Cardiopulmonary Systems and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

RYAN

ORIZONDO Dr. Ryan Orizondo received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2010 and doctoral degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2015 both at the University of Michigan. His doctoral work used benchtop and in vivo studies to investigate the use of ventilation with liquid perfluorocarbons containing emulsified antibiotics to improve treatment of chronic respiratory infections. During his postdoctoral training at the University of Pittsburgh, Ryan was the recipient of a Clinical and Translational Science Postdoctoral (TL1) Fellowship while focusing on the design, modeling, and preclinical testing of improved artificial lungs intended to provide long-term respiratory support as a bridge to lung transplantation. Ryan’s work has led to multiple patents along with numerous publications and international presentations.

CHEMICAL AND PETROLEUM

MOHAMMAD

MASNADI Dr. Masnadi completed his postdoctoral studies at Stanford University in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental sciences. He worked with Prof. Adam Brandt on the Environmental Assessment and Optimization group. He earned his PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering with a sub-specialization in Management Science from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Prior to Stanford, Dr. Masnadi collaborated with the Boeing Company on an investigation into commercial scale production of aviation biofuels from lignocellulosic materials in North America. He has published in leading journals in energy and climate science, including Science, Nature Energy, Nature Climate Change, Applied Energy, and Energy & Environmental Science. Dr. Masnadi interests lie in Energy & Environment interdisciplinary research topics such as data-driven life-cycle assessment, sustainable processes, applied catalysis, and process integration and intensification.

CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL

JOHN

BRIGHAM John Brigham received a BE from Vanderbilt University and a MS and PhD from Cornell University. Following his PhD in 2008 he joined the University of Pittsburgh as an Assistant Professor, and was later promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Bioengineering. In 2016 John joined the Department of Engineering at Durham University in the United Kingdom, where he served as a Professor and Deputy Executive Dean until his return to the University of Pittsburgh this Fall. Focusing on computational mechanics and inverse problems, Dr. Brigham’s research group is actively involved in a number of diverse projects, including kinematic analysis of the heart for improved diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, novel design concepts and optimal design strategies for smart material morphing structures, and efficient and accurate quantitative nondestructive evaluation algorithms.

LEI

FANG Dr. Fang graduated from Colorado State University in 2015 with a BS degree and major in Environmental Engineering. He earned his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering (with a minor in Computational and Mathematical Engineering) in 2020 from Stanford University, where he worked with Prof. Nicholas Ouellette.

Dr. Fang is broadly interested in the behavior of complex systems far from equilibrium and applies the physical understanding of complex systems into environmental and human health applications. He is primarily focused on experimental studies but augments with numerical simulations and theoretical modeling. Current projects in his lab include turbulence in two dimensions, Lagrangian coherent structures, swimmers in turbulence, crowd dynamics, and virus transmission via exhaled airflows.

ALESSANDRO

FASCETTI Dr. Alessandro Fascetti received his Bachelor and Master degrees in Civil Engineering from the Sapienza University of Rome. He obtained his Ph.D. in Structural Engineering from the same institution. In 2017, he joined the Multiscale Computational Mechanics Laboratory at Vanderbilt University as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. He served as a faculty member at the University of Waikato (New Zealand) for 2 years before joining the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Fascetti’s expertise is in physicsand data-based multiscale computational mechanics, and his research team conducts work in the context of advanced infrastructure and digitalization of the urban environment. Recent research projects include the real-time large-scale resilience assessment of flood protection systems, advanced aerial remote sensing for infrastructure monitoring and health assessment and HPC applications for the lattice particle modeling of mixed-mode fracture in composite materials. .

MENG

WANG Dr. Wang’s research interests lie at the interface of bionanotechnology, microbiology, and material science. Specifically, his research seeks to (i) design novel bionanomaterials to enable sustainable and efficient water purification, (ii) harness the biochemical potential of microorganisms in bioremediation and resource recovery, and (iii) understand the effects of emerging contaminants on microbial activities in natural and engineered systems. Meng is currently a postdoctoral scholar in Dr. Shaily Mahendra’s group at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received his BS (2012) in environmental science from Nanjing University, and MS (2015) and PhD (2018) in environmental engineering from UCLA where he worked on engineering protein nanoparticles for water treatment applications.

ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER

KARA

BOCAN Kara Bocan received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2017, and her BSE in Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2012 with a minor in Neuroscience. She performed her dissertation research on wireless implantable medical devices with the RFID Center of Excellence, where her use of computer-aided design was an entry point to the field of computational modeling. More recently, her research has focused on the use of computational modeling to enhance understanding of complex systems, and on the development of effective and usable modeling software. She has taught courses as a Visiting Research Assistant Professor for the Pitt ECE Department since Fall 2018, focusing on active learning and student engagement through interactive examples and open-ended engineering questions. Her teaching interests include blended learning, flipped classrooms, gameful design, technology ethics, and accessibility.

AZIME

CAN-CIMINO Azime Can-Cimino received the BS and MS degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the University of Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey, and the PhD degree in electrical engineering from University of Pittsburgh. Prior to Pitt, she worked as a senior software engineer at Emerson Automations Solutions development team, where among other things, she developed AI algorithms for power and water industry. Her research interests are in machine learning, optimization, and statistics.

She has also contributed to other areas including sampling (signal processing), wavelets and compressive sensing.

RAJKUMAR

KUBENDRAN Rajkumar Kubendran received his PhD degree at the University of California San Diego, where he worked on energy-efficient Neuromorphic VLSI Computing Systems, spanning from devices to applications. His academic interests include low power analog and mixed signal circuit design with emerging non-volatile memory devices to build event-driven architectures for computer vision and machine learning applications. He has demonstrated prototypes of dynamic vision sensors (DVS) and in-memory compute architectures with some of the best energy-efficiency metrics reported in literature. He received the MS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2012. He worked at Qualcomm as an RFIC design engineer, between 2012 and 2014. He received the Best Student Paper award at ISCAS 2013. He has interned with multiple analog and RF design teams in industry, including Intel, IMEC Belgium, MaxLinear and Qualcomm.

PEIPEI

ZHOU Peipei Zhou received her PhD in computer science in August 2019 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also received an MS in electrical and computer engineering in June 2014. Her undergraduate studies were in electrical engineering at Chien-Shiung Wu Honors College, Southeast University, China. She is currently a research scientist at Shanghai Enflame Technology, an AI chip start-up with a research focus on domain-specific language and compiler for AI ASIC Accelerator and computer architecture modeling and system optimization with autotuning. Zhou’s research interests lie in design automation and compilers as well as modeling and optimization for customized, parallel and distributed computing at multiple levels, including chip-level, node-level and cluster-level.

Her research advances field-programmable gate array-based reconfigurable architecture from a performance, energy and cost perspective for deep learning, precision medicine and other big data and machine learning applications.Â

INDUSTRIAL

OLIVER

HINDER Oliver Hinder’s research focuses on continuous optimization, with a penchant for local optimization methods such as gradient descent. He aims to develop reliable and efficient algorithms built on solid mathematical foundations. This research is motivated by applications in network optimization and machine learning that push the limits of current computational capabilities. Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh, he spent a year as postdoctoral researcher at Google in the Optimization and Algorithms group in New York. He received his PhD from the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University where Professor Yinyu Ye was his advisor.Â

JOURDAIN

LAMPERSKI Jourdain Lamperski will be joining the department of Industrial Engineering as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2020. He received his PhD in Operation Research at MIT. At the moment he is interested in problems at the intersection of continuous and discrete optimization, with application to large-scale machine learning and linear inequality systems. Prior to to MIT, he received his B.S. in Mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh.

AMIN

RAHIMIAN Amin Rahimian is an assistant professor of Industrial Engineering at Pitt. Prior to that, he was a postdoc with joint appointments at MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and MIT Sloan School of Management. He did his PhD in Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Broadly speaking his works are at the intersection of networks, data, and decision sciences. He borrows tools from applied probability, statistics, algorithms, as well as decision and game theory.

He is mostly interested in applications involving social and economic networks. Â

MECHANICAL AND MATERIALS SCIENCE

PAUL

OHODNICKI Dr. Paul R. Ohodnicki, Jr. was previously a Materials Scientist in the Materials Engineering & Manufacturing Directorate of the National Energy Technology Laboratory. He earned undergraduate degrees in Engineering Physics and Economics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2005, and he earned masters and doctoral degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 and 2008, respectively. Upon graduation, he joined PPG Industries as a Research Engineer and a Visiting Scholar where he worked on designing and scaling up large-area glass coatings for energy efficient architectural windows and concentrating solar power applications. In 2010, Paul joined the National Energy Technology Laboratory where he is currently a senior staff scientist overseeing programs focused on research and development of advanced functional materials and devices for sensors, power electronics, and energy conversion applications. He has co-authored more than 110 publications and is a co-inventor on more than 35 patent applications with 12 awarded to date. He is currently serving as vice-Chair for the Functional Materials Division of TMS and has earned a number of prestigious recognitions throughout his career, with the most recent honors including the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (2016), the Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Innovation Award from the Carnegie Science Center (2017), and a nomination for the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Promising Innovations Medal (2017).