The Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science welcomes seven new faculty members this fall that bring experience and research expertise in a variety of fields.
Ameeta Agrawal, Computer Science
Ph.D., York University
Dr. Agrawal's areas of research include natural language processing, computational linguistics, and machine learning. She is particularly interested in distributional semantics, textual effect analysis (e.g., emotion, sentiment, and sarcasm detection), and news recommender systems. Her current focus is on efficient unsupervised learning and biases in computational modeling.
David Burnett, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Burnett has spent most of his career designing sensor systems for scientific, medical, and defense applications. Some of his past projects include wearable biorhythm monitoring, shallow-water intrusion detection, miniature ROVs, and chip-scale wireless chemical sensors. His current research interests are low-power wireless motes and field-deployable sensor systems.
Mahima Gupta, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison
Dr. Gupta's research program will focus on the characterization of advanced power semiconductor devices, development of converter topologies and control strategies, switching circuit realization and layout, and mitigation of electromagnetic interference.
Samantha Hartzell, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Ph.D., Princeton University
Dr. Hartzell uses both stochastic and deterministic frameworks to study the dynamics of carbon, water, and nutrient exchange among the soil, vegetation, and atmosphere. She is particularly interested in limitations of moisture availability on ecosystem productivity.
Yuchen Huang, Electrical and Computer Engineering
M.M.E.E., Portland State University
Ms. Huang served as a senior staff engineer at Intel prior to joining PSU and was involved in key product development and industry adoption of technologies, standards, and methodologies. She was the chairperson of cross-functional Joint Engineering Teams at Intel and industry consortium JEDEC DDR2 Memory Power Thermal Task Group, addressing system-level memory power, thermal, and performance challenges.
Fang Song, Computer Science
Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Song focuses on the theoretical foundations of computation, especially an emerging paradigm named quantum computing. His research explores the power of quantum computer algorithms to solve hard computational problems, and develops cryptographic techniques to combat the unprecedented threats to cybersecurity enabled by quantum computing.
David Yang, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Ph.D., The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Dr. Yang's research focuses on risk management for civil infrastructure under climate change and maintenance optimization of deteriorating structures. As climate change rapidly shifts the frequency and severity of various natural disasters, his research strives to develop novel, effective approaches to climate adaptation planning for civil infrastructure systems, primarily through the innovative applications of machine learning and probabilistic methods.