Three UConn engineering faculty members – Drs. Alexander Shvartsman, Mark Tehranipoor and Ki Chon – will be inducted into the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE). They are among the 23 members who will be inducted at a ceremony May 19 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Cromwell (invitations & RSVP forms will be e-mailed to members in early March). This year’s keynote address will be a Conversation with Dr. Edison T. Liu, President & CEO, The Jackson Laboratory. The ceremony will be hosted by Documentary Producer Christina DeFranco.

Dr. Alexander Shvartsman, Department Head of Computer Science and Engineering; Director of Center for Voting Technology Research; and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering

Dr. Shvartsman has contributed crucial work to the field of electronic voting technology. In 2006, he founded the UConn Center for Voting Technology Research (VoTeR Center), which  has become a vital resource to Connecticut and a nationally recognized research center in the field of electronic voting systems. He has published groundbreaking work highlighting  insufficient security in modern electronic voting machines. The State of Connecticut relies on Dr. Shvartsman and his team to establish safe-use procedures for electronic voting systems. In 2009, Dr. Shvartsman was honored by the Secretary of the State with a Public Service Award for “invaluable contributions to assuring the success of our electoral process.”

He has contributed to the computing field as a program committee member for more than 45 international conferences, and he served in leadership positions of over 15 committees of leading conferences in his area of research, including chairing the steering committees of both top conferences in distributed algorithms (ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing and International Symposium on Distributed Computing). He is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Computers – among the oldest, most respected research journals in computer science, and the USENIX Journal of Election Technology and Systems – the newest and only journal in security and integrity of electronic election systems.

Dr. Mark Tehranipoor,  Founding Director for both the Center for Hardware Assurance, Security, and Engineering (CHASE) and the Comcast Center of Excellence in Security Innovation (CSI) at UConn. 

Dr. Tehranipoor’s research has been supported by federal and industrial grants, gifts, and donations worth approximately $20 million. His groundbreaking scholarly contributions to the field have resulted in six books, 10 book chapters, 54 journal articles, and 180 conference papers.

In 2012, he established the Center for Hardware Assurance, Security, and Engineering (CHASE) to provide the University with the physical and intellectual environment necessary for interdisciplinary hardware-oriented research and to meet future challenges  in the field of assurance and security. CHASE is a research consortium with member companies from across the nation committed to advancing the research that will shape future electronic systems.  In April 2014, he played a key role in forming a partnership between UConn School of Engineering and Comcast to create the Center of Excellence for Security Innovation (CSI). The Center’s mission is to lead research, and workforce development in hardware, software, network security. He is one of the principal investigators on a project to analyze and upgrade security protections for nanoscale computer hardware, funded with a $7.5 million MURI grant from the U.S. Department of Defense.

Dr, Ki Chon, Professor and Head of the Biomedical Engineering Department

Dr. Chon, who joined the UConn faculty in August 2014, has been awarded more than 20 patents, and his numerous grants include $3 million in National Science Foundation funding for a training program for Ph.D. students in biofabrication. His most recent research has focused on the development of wireless, wearable, and low-cost monitoring devices for detection of cardiac malignment arrhythmia. This work has received NIH funding and a $1.9 million grant from the U.S. Army. He has published more than 100 papers in the peer-reviewed journals and contributed dozens of book chapters. Among his many distinctions, Dr. Chon has won the Promising Inventor Award from the Research Foundation at SUNY, and served as associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering from 2007 to 2013.

Previously, Dr. Chon served as Head of the BME department of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute from 2010-2014. In that time, he doubled the number of department faculty members, increased research expenditures from $400,000 to more than $3 million and more than doubled undergraduate enrollment. Dr. Chon also developed an algorithm that more accurately detects atrial fibrillation than existing technology. It has been licensed for use in a heart monitor. He has developed a wearable device to detect internal blood loss, which are to be worn by U.S. soldiers.