UConn Engineering Welcomes 13 New Faculty

Following an exponential increase in student enrollment, an investment in entrepreneurship-backed faculty, and an overall investment in new subject areas, the University of Connecticut School of Engineering is proud to announce that 13 new faculty have started in Fall 2021.

As Caroline Doty recovers from knee surgery, she stays active with her team from the bench.

First row (left to right): Shiri Dori-Hacohen, Monika Filipovska, Kyungjin Kim, Hugo Posada-Quintero; Second row (left to right): Jacek Ossowski, Zongjie Wang, Leila Daneshmandi, Shan ”Susan” Zuo, Brittany Nkounkou; Bottom row (left to right): Burcu Beykal, Wei Zhang, Fayekah Assanah, Lina Kloub.

 

By: Eli Freund, Editorial Communications Manager, UConn School of Engineering 

Following an exponential increase in student enrollment, an investment in entrepreneurship-backed faculty, and an overall investment in new subject areas, the University of Connecticut School of Engineering is proud to announce that 13 new faculty have started in Fall 2021.

These 13 new faculty break down into five new faculty in the Computer Science and Engineering Department, three new faculty in the Biomedical Engineering Department, two new faculty in the Mechanical Engineering Department, two new faculty in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and one new faculty in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.

All come with impressive backgrounds and hail from as close as UConn, Cornell, and Georgia Tech for their graduate studies, to as far away as Beihang University in China. With an investment in entrepreneurial backgrounds by the University, others also have experience in start-ups, with some new faculty creating companies in areas like cancer treatment and battling disinformation across the internet.

The thirteen new faculty members are as follows:

Name: Fayekah Assanah

Department: Biomedical Engineering

Title: Assistant Professor in Residence

PhD Institution: University of Connecticut

Research Areas:  Synthesis of hydrogels to mimic the mechanical behavior of the brain matter and investigate cellular response to traumatic brain injury.

 

Name: Burcu Beykal

Department: Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering

Title: Assistant Professor

PhD Institution: Texas A&M University

Research Areas: Process Systems Engineering, Hybrid Modeling, Machine Learning

 

Name: Leila Daneshmandi

Department: Biomedical Engineering

Title: Assistant Professor in Residence of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

PhD Institution: UConn

Research Areas: Innovation, Entrepreneurship

 

Name: Shiri Dori-Hacohen 

Department: Computer Science & Engineering

Title: Assistant Professor

PhD Institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst

Research Areas: Reducing threats to the information ecosystem online and to improving public discourse from an information retrieval lens, informed by insights from the social sciences.

 

Name: Monika Filipovska

Department: Civil and Environmental Engineering

Title: Assistant Professor

PhD Institution: Northwestern University

Research Areas: Transportation Network Modeling and Optimization, Traffic Flow Modeling, Simulation and Prediction, Predictive Analytics for Real-Time Intelligent Transportation Systems Operations, Applications of Emerging Technologies, Big Data, and Data Analytics in Transportation

 

Name: Kyungjin Kim

Department: Mechanical Engineering

Title: Assistant Professor

PhD Institution: Georgia Institute of Technology (PhD in ME, 2018)

Research Areas: Thin films mechanics and encapsulation. Reliability engineering for flexible and implantable electronics.

 

Name: Lina Kloub

Department: Computer Science and Engineering

Title: Assistant Professor in Residence

PhD Institution: University of Connecticut, 2021

Research Areas: My research interests are in computational biology, bioinformatics, and on developing new computational frameworks to help answer fundamental biological questions.

 

Name: Brittany Nkounkou

Department: Computer Science and Engineering

Title: Assistant Professor

PhD Institution: Cornell University

Research Areas: Programming Languages, Certified Software

 

Name: Jacek Ossowski

Department: Computer Science and Engineering

Title: Assistant Professor in Residence

PhD Institution: New York University

Research Areas: Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Reinforcement Learning

 

Name: Hugo Posada-Quintero 

Department: Biomedical Engineering

Title: Assistant Professor

PhD Institution: University of Connecticut

Research Areas: Biomedical signal processing, wearable instrumentation, biomarkers of human emotions, biosensors, biomedical instrumentation

 

Name: Zongjie Wang

Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering

Title: Assistant Professor

Ph.D. Institution: Cornell University (joint Ph.D. program), Harbin Institute of Technology

Research Areas: Power systems, non-linear optimization and simulation, power market, coordinated transmission, and distribution frameworks.

 

Name: Wei Zhang

Department: Computer Science and Engineering

Title: Assistant Professor

PhD Institution: George Washington University (in US), Beihang University (in China)

Research Areas: Cloud Computing, Operating System, Distributed System, Network and Storage System, Edge Computing, Machine Learning System, Resource Disaggregation

 

Name: Shan ”Susan” Zuo 

Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering

Title: Assistant Professor

PhD Institution: University of Texas at Arlington

Research Areas: Distributed cooperative control, cyber-physical systems, reinforcement learning, attack-resilient control, microgrids, renewable energy systems