Eight New Faculty Join UCI Engineering
Aug. 27, 2021 - The UC Irvine Samueli School of Engineering is welcoming eight faculty members during the 2021-22 academic year, including Magnus Egerstedt, the new Stacey Nicholas Dean of Engineering. The new members are:
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- Biomedical Engineering
- Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
- Materials Science and Engineering
- Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Pim Oomen (April 2022)
Assistant Professor
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Research Interests: cardiovascular biomechanics, electrophysiology, growth and remodeling, patient-specific modeling
Education: Ph.D., University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Oomen’s research mission is to develop multiscale computational and experimental tools to advance our knowledge of cardiovascular biomechanics, growth and remodeling, and electrophysiology, to employ these tools to improve cardiovascular health, and to train a new, diverse generation of biomedical engineers. He comes to UCI from the University of Virginia where he was a senior scientist and postdoctoral researcher. He was named a Rising Star in Engineering in Health by Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University in 2021. He is the author of 12 research papers and 13 conference proceedings.
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Magnus Egerstedt
Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Research Interests: control theory and robotics, control and coordination of complex networks, multirobot systems, mobile sensor networks and cyberphysical systems
Education: Ph.D., KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden
Egerstedt’s research pursuits center on control theory and robotics. His work has resulted in innovations in remote environmental monitoring and precision agriculture, and he has worked extensively on the control and coordination of complex networks, such as multirobot systems, mobile sensor networks and cyberphysical systems. He led the creation of the Robotarium, a remotely accessible swarm robotics lab used by thousands of researchers around the world. He also helped develop SlothBot, a hyper-energy-efficient environmental monitoring robot. Egerstedt has authored or co-authored six books, 28 book chapters and 302 journal papers. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the International Federation of Automatic Control as well as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.
Sitao Huang (January 2022)
Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Research Interests: hardware accelerators, programming languages and compilers for accelerators, high-level synthesis, heterogeneous computing
Education: Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Huang’s research interests include highly efficient hardware acceleration, programming language and synthesis flow for hardware systems and optimization of heterogenous systems. He is a recipient of 2019 Sundaram Seshu International Student Fellowship and 2018 Rambus Computer Engineering Fellowship. His has published 22 peer-reviewed papers and his research has won several awards, including a Best Paper nomination at the Asia and South Pacific-Design Automation Conference 2021, the Student Innovation Award at the 2018 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Graph Challenge and first place in the Design Automation Conference 2019 System Design Contest.
Maxim Shcherbakov
Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Research Interests: nanotechnology, nonlinear and quantum optics, optics-based telecommunications and computing, laser physics
Education: Ph.D., Lomonosov Moscow State University
In his research, Shcherbakov merges fundamental physics concepts and cutting-edge nanotechnology to innovate in the area of photonic devices. Designer nanomaterials offer unprecedented flexibility to manipulate light waves on demand. Shcherbakov uses a plethora of theoretical and experimental methods to conceive next-generation light-based components to find use in imagers, AR/VR technology, telecommunications and quantum computing. Shcherbakov is the recipient of a Moscow Government Young Investigator award (2015), a DAAD Scholarship for research at Friedrich Schiller University, Germany, and a SPIE (International Society for Optics and Photonics) Scholarship for graduate students (2011).
Materials Science and Engineering
Shen Dillon
Professor
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Research Interests: materials characterization, interface science, in situ microscopy, materials for extreme environments, materials structure-properties relationships in crystalline materials
Education: Ph.D., Lehigh University
Dillon was previously an associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His scientific interests relate to understanding the key role played by inorganic interfacial structure-property relationships in affecting the performance of systems in extreme environments. Much of his recent work relates to developing novel in situ characterization techniques that can be applied to understanding the dynamic properties of materials and their interfaces. He is the author of over 100 articles and was a recipient of the 2011 Department of Energy Early Career Award, the 2013 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the 2015 American Ceramic Society’s Robert L. Coble Award for Young Scholars.
Kai He (January 2022)
Assistant Professor
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Research Interests: transmission electron microscopy, spectroscopy, and holography, nanostructured multifunctional materials, energy conversion and storage, quantum materials and devices
Education: Ph.D., Arizona State University
He’s research focuses on the development of advanced electron microscopy methodologies and their applications in nanostructured multifunctional materials for clean energy and quantum information technologies. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Clemson University. He completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Maryland and Brookhaven National Laboratory and worked as a research assistant professor at Northwestern University before going to Clemson. He is the author of more than 80 peer-reviewed publications and is a recipient of the DOE Early Career Award (2021), American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Award (2021), NSF EPSCoR Early Career Faculty Fellowship Track 4 (2019), and Microscopy Society of America’s Presidential Scholar Award (2014).
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
SungWoo Nam
Associate Professor
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Research Interests: materials, mechanics and multifunctionality; understanding mechanically coupled properties in low-dimensional materials; building devices based on advanced materials
Education: Ph.D., Harvard University
Nam conducts research at the intersection of materials, mechanics and multifunctionality, where he focuses on understanding mechanically coupled properties in low-dimensional materials and building devices based on advanced materials. Nam was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley before joining the faculty at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2012. He was an associate professor and the Anderson Faculty Scholar in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at UIUC before coming to UCI. Nam is author or co-author of 50 papers in research journals. He is a recipient of The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society Early Career Faculty Fellow Award, NSF CAREER Award, AFOSR and ONR Young Investigator Program Awards and the NASA Early Career Faculty Award.
Xian Shi (January 2022)
Assistant Professor
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Research Interests: energy conversion, propulsion, reacting flows, shock and detonation, chemical kinetics, energy storage, carbon materials, materials synthesis, nanoparticle dynamics, carbon capture and storage
Education: Ph.D., UC Berkeley
Shi’s research seeks to enable next-generation energy conversion and propulsion technologies through studying the fundamental physics and chemistry of reacting flows and materials. Shi, who will join the faculty in spring, currently is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, where he leads research in detonation dynamics and kinetics and its realization in miniaturized power devices such as rotating detonation engines. He also studies carbon nanoparticles and quantum dots through the lens of soot formation in flames. His doctoral work at UC Berkeley focused on understanding inhomogeneous-composition reacting flow and abnormal high-pressure physics in reciprocating engines. Shi has won the Starkman and the Hamilton Fellowships from UC Berkeley, as well as the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award.
– Lori Brandt
