Three New Faculty Join UCI Engineering
The UC Irvine Samueli School of Engineering welcomes three new faculty in fall 2024:
Associate Professor, Henry Samueli Faculty Excellence Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Dion Khodagholy brings his Translational Neuroelectronics Lab team with him from Columbia University to UCI. Their research develops soft electronics that can go into the human brain to enable deeper understanding of how the brain works. He integrates electronics, materials science and neuroscience to create high performance biocompatible electronics to acquire neural data in the context of learning and memory. Their aim is to develop more effective diagnostics and treatments of neuropsychiatric disorders.
Before coming to UCI, Khodagholy was an associate professor at Columbia University in the Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science. He received a master’s degree from the University of Birmingham (UK) in electronics and telecommunication engineering and another master’s degree and his Ph.D. in microelectronics at the Ecole des Mines, France. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in systems neuroscience at New York University, Langone Medical Center.
Assistant Professor
Materials Science and Engineering
Ty Christoff-Tempesta designs new materials from the molecule up to address outstanding challenges in sustainability and health. By combining tools and principles of organic chemistry, molecular self-assembly and polymer science, he engineers and links together novel organic molecules to emerge useful properties in soft materials from the nanoscale to the macroscale. Christoff-Tempesta's lab seeks to make fundamental advancements in soft matter science to address generational challenges in areas including climate change, plastics waste and water security.
Christoff-Tempesta comes to UCI from his postdoc at the University of Delaware, where he researched closed-loop polymeric systems from renewable feedstocks. Previously, he completed his Ph.D. in polymers and soft matter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he investigated molecular designs to produce robust small-molecule assemblies and their application to water treatment.
Assistant Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Boris Vaisband’s research is focused on heterogeneous large-scale integration and advanced packaging. He envisions ultra-large scale highly integrated systems to significantly reduce the footprint and power of current computer engines such as reducing a server rack the size of a large refrigerator to a system the size of a dinner plate. His innovation in advanced packaging enables tight integration of components and highly efficient communication. He is developing models, circuits, algorithms and methodologies to enable high-performance computer systems of tomorrow.
He comes to UCI from McGill University in Canada where he was an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering. He was a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA after he received a Ph.D. and master’s in electrical engineering from the University of Rochester. He received his BSc from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and held various hardware design positions at Intel, Cisco and Google before working in academia.
