ENGINEERING

The Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering, has hired 13 new faculty for the 2003-04 academic year. Established in 1989, it is the fastest growing engineering school in the UC system with a population projected to grow from 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students to 3,000 within the next decade. Significant emphasis is placed on providing additional faculty, facilities, and funding to increase quality as well as size. A new 100,000-square-foot engineering building is well into construction and another is in the planning stage. Jerome Schultz, a distinguished professor of chemical & environmental engineering, has been hired to be the director of the new bioengineering center, one of two new research centers, including one investigating embedded networks, in the college. They will join three existing centers: The Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE), the Center for Research in Intelligent Systems (CRIS), and the College of Engineering - Center for Environmental Research and Technology (CE-CERT). Another 12 new faculty members were hired by the college effective July 1, 2003 and will bolster all four of its departments – Chemical & Environmental Engineering, Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. CHEMICAL & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING Kenneth Kauffman, assistant professor of chemical & environmental engineering Ph.D. (Chemical Engineering) University of Delaware 2003 Research specialization: Tools for the analysis of connectivity and regulation; building control relevant models of advanced biological processes from complex data sets. Kenneth Kauffman was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow from 1998-2001 and a National Aeronautics and Space Administration Graduate Student Researchers Program Fellow for 2001-2003. He is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, American Society for Engineering Education, American Chemical Society, and the engineering honor societies Omega Chi Epsilon and Tau Beta Pi. Nosang Myung, assistant professor of chemical & environmental engineering Ph.D. (Chemical Engineering) University of California, Los Angeles 1998 Research specialization: Electrochemistry; electroplating; corrosion, magnetic materials and magnetism; nano-devices; thermoelectric materials; nano-microelectrial mechanical systems. Nosang Myung was a researcher at UCLA for three years before joining the microelectrical mechanical systems (MEMS) group at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 2001 as a member of the engineering staff. He received the JPL Spot Award in 2002. He is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineering, the Materials Research Society, the Electrochemical Society and the International Society of Electrochemistry. COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING Gianfranco Ciardo, professor of computer science & engineering Ph.D. (Computer Science) Duke University 1989 Research specialization: Stochastic models; software verification, model checking, Petri nets, structured and Kronecker based approaches for Markov analysis. Gianfranco Ciardo is associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He was the keynote speaker at a joint Petri Nets and Performance Models conference in Germany in 2001. He received IBM Graduate Fellowships in 1985-1986 and 1986-1987. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the IEEE Computer Society, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and its special interest group SIGMETRICS. Gurudatta Parulkar, professor of computer science & engineering Ph.D. (Computer and Information Science) University of Delaware Research specialization: High performance networking and multimedia systems; protocols, operating system and network interface support for distributed imaging and multimedia applications. Gurudatta Parulkar was a participant in the NSF sponsored INDO-US Workshop on Cooperative Research in Computer Sciences to promote collaboration between Indian and U.S. Computer Science communities. He has served as reviewer for numerous conferences and workshops and several journals. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the IEEE Computer Society. Christian Shelton, assistant professor of computer science & engineering Ph.D. (Computer Science) Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2001 Research specialization: Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational game theory. Christian Shelton is on leave until March 2004 as part of a team developing an optimized vision library at the Intel Microprocessor Research Lab in Santa Clara. He is Managing Editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), which provides an international forum for the electronic and paper publication of scholarly articles on machine learning. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Neal Young, associate professor of computer science & engineering Ph.D. (Computer Science) Princeton University 1991 Research specialization: Theoretical and practical analysis of algorithms, specializing in approximation algorithms for combinatorial optimization. Neal Young's recent work has focused on fast algorithms for special classes of linear programs and on theoretical analysis of optimization problems arising in dynamic networks. He was a Hertz Fellow from 1986-1991 and received a NSF Career Award in 1998-1999. He is a member of ACM SIGACT (Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computational Theory), and Phi Beta Kappa. ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING Amit Roy Chowdhury, assistant professor of electrical engineering Ph.D. (Electrical & Computer Engineering) University of Maryland 2002 Research specialization: Signal processing and communications, with focus in video processing and computer vision. Amit Roy Chowdhury was a research associate at the Center for Automation Research at the University of Maryland prior to his appointment at UC Riverside. He is currently investigating methods for face modeling and recognition, gait modeling and recognition and the identification of human activities based on surveillance videos. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Ilya Lyubomirsky, assistant professor of electrical engineering Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering) Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1999 Research specialization: Transmission/capacity limits of fiber optic communication systems based on Ultra-Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (UDWDM). Ilya Lyubomirsky has worked as a researcher and/or engineer at University of Maryland – Institute for Physical Science & Technology, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, MIT – Research Laboratory of Electronics, Telecordia Technologies, ONI Systems, and Ciena Corp. He received the Higginbotham Mathematics Award at University of Maryland in 1991, and was a Hertz Foundation Fellow from 1991-1997. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Ertem Tuncel, assistant professor of electrical engineering Ph.D. (Electrical and Computer Engineering) University of California, Santa Barbara 2002 Research specialization: Multi-terminal source coding, compression for efficient content-based retrieval in multimedia databases. Ertem Tuncel has worked as a research assistant and postgraduate researcher at UC Santa Barbara, working on distributed source coding. He did a summer internship at the Digital Media Division of Microsoft. He received graduate fellowships in 1995-1997 from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, and in 1997-2002 from UC Santa Barbara. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). MECHANICAL ENGINEERING Guillermo Aguilar, assistant professor of mechanical engineering Ph.D. (Mechanical Engineering) University of California, Santa Barbara 1999 Research specialization: Cryogen spray cooling, medical lasers and transport phenomena for biomedical applications. Guillermo Aguilar was the recipient of a five-year scholarship from the Dirección General de Asuntos del Personal Académico - Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico for graduate studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is a member of the American Society of Lasers in Medicine and Surgery, International Liquid Atomization and Spray Systems, International Society for Optical Engineering, Society of Rheology and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Thomas Stahovich associate professor of mechanical engineering Ph.D. (Mechanical Engineering/Artificial Intelligence) Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1995 Research specialization: Design and controls, engineering design, artificial intelligence, and sketch understanding. Thomas Stahovich was the founding director of the Smart Tools Lab at Carnegie Mellon. Recent work involves applying design automation to the problem of cryosurgical planning. He is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the scientific research society Sigma Xi, the mechanical engineering honor society Pi Tau Sigma, and the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi. Junlan Wang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering Ph.D. (Theoretical and Applied Mechanics) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2002 Research specialization: Nano and micromechanics of materials, particularly techniques for studying the mechanical behavior of thin films and other small-featured structures. Junlan Wang's recent research includes characterization of thin film adhesion, scale bridging in fabrication and property testing of nano and microstructures, surface roughness evolution and residual stress development caused by nano-scale contact. She is a member of Experimental Mechanics, the Materials Research Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). The addition of these new faculty members is one of many indicators that the College is well on its way to achieving its vision of becoming a nationally recognized leader in engineering research and education.