Engineering Newsletter

Faculty growth in The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science continues this academic year with the announcement by Interim Dean Gerald A. Navratil that 12 new professors will be joining the SEAS faculty. “We again are fortunate to be able to recruit faculty from among the finest institutions worldwide. This year, new faculty will be joining seven of our departments, bringing with them diverse backgrounds and interests that mirror those of our own student body. We are pleased that they are joining our vibrant community of educator-researchers.” Ten professors have begun teaching classes and settling into their departments for the Fall semester, which began on Sept. 2. Two additional assistant professors will join the SEAS faculty for the Spring semester. New faculty members for the Fall semester include:

Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics
Chris Marianetti, assistant professor in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, received his BS and MS degrees from the Ohio State University and PhD in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did post-doctoral research in the Department of Physics at Rutgers University and in the Materials Chemistry Division of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Marianetti’s research interests lie in the use of classical and quantum mechanics to model the behavior of materials at the atomic scale. In particular, Marianetti is focused on applying these techniques to materials with potential for energy storage and conversion. Current applications in Marianetti’s research program range from nuclear materials such as plutonium to rechargeable battery materials such as the cobalt oxides. “Confronting the great technical challenges of our times, such as clean sustainable energy, will increasingly rely on the modeling of materials from the atomic scale to the continuum,” he says. Marianetti will be teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in Materials Science and Engineering this year.

Biomedical Engineering
Hayden Huang, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, comes to Columbia SEAS from a position as associate biophysicist and instructor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He received his BS degree from Johns Hopkins University in biomedical engineering and, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an SM in mechanical engineering and PhD in medical engineering. His Biomechanics and Mechanotransduction Laboratory studies cellular mechanics and mechanotransduction in cells and cell clusters.

“While our projects are focused on the cardiovascular system, the techniques and insight are relevant to many other cell and tissue systems,” Huang says.“We are interested in determining how cell-cell interactions, especially at the junctions where cells make contact, influence cellular mechanical behavior. We are also developing instrumentation and new techniques for probing cells and tissues.” Huang will be co-teaching Tissue and Molecular Engineering Laboratory with Associate Professor Christopher R. Jacobs this semester and Cell Mechanics in the Spring.

Associate Professor Christopher R. Jacobs was formerly an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford and, prior to that, an assistant professor in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Pennsylvania State University. He received his BS degree in systems science and mathematics from Washington University, and MS and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from Stanford.

“My main research interest is to understand the molecular mechanisms that allow cells of the skeletal system to sense and respond to mechanical stimulation,” says Jacobs. “The Cell and Molecular Biomechanics Laboratory that I direct primarily focuses on mechanosensitivity of bone cells as it relates to osteoporosis, stress fractures and disuse bone loss associated with spinal cord injury and space flight.” In particular, his group is working to determine, at a cellular level, how bone tissue is regulated by physical loading, which has applications in developing new therapies to age-related bone loss and osteoporosis. He will be co-teaching with Assistant Professor Hayden Huang a new graduate level course, Tissue and Molecular Engineering Laboratory, this semester and Cell Mechanics in the spring.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Haim Waisman, an assistant professor, received his BSc and MSc degrees in aerospace engineering from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the PhD in civil engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Prior to becoming a senior research scientist at Global Engineering and Materials, Inc., Dr.Waisman was a postdoctoral fellow in mechanical engineering at Northwestern University and at SCOREC, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s scientific computation research center. Dr.Waisman develops novel computational methods to model material failure due to quasi-static, fatigue and blast loads.

“My current research focuses on the Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM) to model cracks and crack propagation without user intervention,” he says. “I also have developed multi-grid and multi-scale methods to model and accelerate the response of systems that include multiple length and time scales.” He will be teaching Finite Element Analysis I and II this year.

Huiming Yin, also a new assistant professor in the department, received the BSE in engineering mechanics from Hohai University, MS in solid mechanics from Peking University, and PhD in structural mechanics from the University of Iowa. Yin specializes in the multi-scale/physics characterization of civil engineering materials and structures with experimental, analytical and numerical methods. His research interests are interdisciplinary and range from structures and materials to innovative construction technologies and test methods.

“I am interested in topics that include multi-scale characterization and design of warm mix asphalt, performancebased investigation of rubberized and polymer-modified asphalt, fracture testing and modeling of engineering materials and structures, nuclear test methods for the compaction control of pavement construction, and multi-scale/physical characterization of smart materials and structures,” he says.Yin is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, United States Association for Computational Mechanics and The International Association for Computational Mechanics. He is teaching A dvanced Mechanics of Solids this semester and will be teaching Experimental Mechanics in the spring.

Computer Science
Junfeng Yang, an assistant professor, comes to the Department of Computer Science from Microsoft Research Silicon Valley. He earned his BS in computer science from Tsinghua University in Beijing, and MS and PhD degrees in computer science from Stanford University. A recipient of the Siebel Scholarship, the Stanford School of Engineering Fellowship, and the Best Paper Award of OSDI 2004, his research interests are operating systems, software error detection, security and storage systems. His past work has focused on detecting serious errors in large, complex software, using model checking to find storage system errors that vaporize entire file systems, symbolic execution to generate malicious disk images that take over control of a Linux kernel and static analysis to detect Linux kernel security holes. He is teaching How to Make Reliable Software.

Assistant Professor Rui Castro received the Aerospace Engineering degree (Licenciatura) in 1998, from Instituto Superior Técnico,Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, and a PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University in 2007. He was formerly a research assistant in the Communication Theory and Pattern Recognition Group at the Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal, and during the summer of 2002 was at Lucent Technologies – Bell Labs Research, working on network traffic models. Most recently he was a research associate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received a Graduate Student Mentor Award. His research interests include statistical learning theory and signal and image processing, with applications to medical imaging, network inference and sensor networks. He is particularly interested in learning procedures that employ a closed-loop data collection process, where information gleaned from previous data is used to guide the collection of future data, in the spirit of the “twenty-questions” game. “These kinds of learning procedures have application in areas as relevant and diverse as systems biology, communications and network monitoring,” Castro says. He is teaching Signals and Systems this semester.

Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Özalp Özer, who received the MS and PhD degrees in operations research from Columbia, returns to SEAS as associate professor from a post on the faculty of the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford. His general research interest is to investigate the impact of technology and information on new product development, production, marketing and distribution of goods and services, engineering and management of supply chains and pricing management. Özer has received the Wickham Skinner Early-Career Research Accomplishment Award from the Production and Operations Management Society in 2004, and the Eugene Grant Teaching Award at Stanford by vote of students in 2003 and 2004. His articles have appeared in journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. He is currently an associate editor for Operations Research and Production and Operations Management. He is an active consultant to industry and has consulted for companies such as Ericsson, General Motors, Hitachi GST and Hewlett Packard.

“In my research I investigate how new technology, such as RFID (radio frequency identification), and information can be used to make better strategic and operational decisions,” he says.“To do so, I develop mathematical models, algorithms and more recently, behavioral experiments to prescribe effective policies to make better decisions for firms competing in today’s dynamic and uncertain global marketplace.” Özer is currently teaching Production and Operations Management.

Mechanical Engineering
Jung-Chi Liao, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, received his BS from National Taiwan University and MS and PhD degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was formerly a research associate in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Lin Memorial Scholar Award, Delta Electronics Foundation Scholar Award, and Presidential Awards, National Taiwan University. His research interests are concentrated on how mechanical forces play roles in molecules and cells, using both computational and experimental methods to study molecular motors and related cellular functions.

“The focus of my work is to integrate computational modeling and simulation with biological imaging techniques to study dynamics of molecular motors,” he says.

Elon Terrell, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received his PhD in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007, and MS and BS degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests involve the thermal-fluid sciences, energy and tribology.

In particular, says Terrell, “I am focusing on research in hydrodynamic lubrication, surface engineering, and contact mechanics, which can be applied to lubrication and wear in MEMS devices, as well as efficiency and longevity maximization of energy systems, design improvement of biomedical devices and sustainable manufacturing.”

New faculty who will begin in Spring 2009 will join the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Harish Krishnaswamy, a new assistant professor in electrical engineering, received the BTech degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras and the MS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2003. He is currently a doctoral candidate at USC. He has worked at Sierra Monolithics, Inc. and the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center; his research interests lie in the areas of analog, RF and millimeter-wave circuit design.

Assistant Professor Martha Mercaldi- Kim will join the Department of Computer Science upon completion of her PhD requirements at the University of Washington, where she also received her MS degree. She holds the MEng degree in embedded systems design from Universita della Swizzera Italiana in Lugano, and AB in computer science from Harvard. Her research interests are in decentralized, spatial architectures that will accommodate evolving application demands and design constraints.