Meet the New Faces of the Samueli School
Engineering welcomes five faculty members in civil and environmental engineering and electrical engineering and computer science
The Henry Samueli School of Engineering is pleased to introduce five new faculty members, including the arrival of Rafael L. Bras, dean and distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering; Russell Detwiler, Wenlong Jin and Diego Rosso, assistant professors of civil and environmental engineering; and, Filippo Capolino, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science.
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Rafael L. Bras, Sc.D., recently joined UC Irvine as dean of The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, as well as a distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering. A prominent hydrologist and hydroclimatologist from MIT, he is well known for his contributions to soil-vegetation-atmosphere system modeling, and he has been recognized for his innovative work describing and forecasting floods and precipitation. His landscape-river basin-evolution models are widely used in hydrology and geology. Bras has also pioneered ideas about how the deforestation of the Amazon will impact regional and continental climates.
Russell Detwiler, Ph.D., came to UC Irvine from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he was the deputy group leader for the Experimental Geophysics Group. His research focuses on understanding mechanisms that control fluid flow and contaminant migration in the subsurface. He currently focuses on integrating laboratory-scale experimentation with the development of scalable computational models to develop new approaches for predicting coupled subsurface processes in the field. Results from his research underpin efforts to restore contaminated groundwater and minimize greenhouse gas emissions by geologically separating carbon dioxide and enhancing the use of geothermal resources.
Wenlong Jin, Ph.D., joined UC Irvine after serving as an associate professor in the Department of Automation at the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China. Jin’s research focuses on understanding the formation and propagation of traffic congestion in road networks - which can be caused by various bottlenecks and driver behavior - and the development of intelligent transportation systems to alleviate traffic congestion and improve travel safety and the efficiency of transportation systems by utilizing the latest information and communication technologies, especially inter-vehicle communications.
Diego Rosso, Ph.D., assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at UCLA prior to UC Irvine. Rosso is the principal investigator at the UC Irvine Environmental Process Laboratory, and his research focuses on sustainable water reclamation and wastewater treatment, including the study of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sequestration in the treatment processes. The ultimate goal of his research is to minimize the carbon footprint of and maximize energy recovery in the treatment processes. He is an active member and campus adviser of Engineers Without Borders.
Filippo Capolino, Ph.D., assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was an assistant professor in the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Siena, Italy, before joining UC Irvine in July. His research focuses on metamaterials, optics and electromagnetism in nanostructures, plasmonics, microwaves, and their applications in sensors, antennas, RF and wireless systems. He has been very active in the new field of metamaterials, which are artificially engineered nano- or micro-structured materials possessing unusual and extreme properties that affect electromagnetic/optical waves. Capolino is preparing a two-volume handbook on this new research topic, and has also received several international awards and published more than 50 articles in technical journals, mostly in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions. 