New Faculty Bolster School's Expertise

A Resource for Students and Industry Alike

The Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas has added 11 new faculty members this fall, continuing a steady expansion in which the school's faculty has grown by nearly 50 percent since 2003.

As a group these faculty range from a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins to a 20-year veteran of IBM's acclaimed Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

“These outstanding individuals are helping change the world in important ways in a number of areas, including wireless communications, shape memory polymers, flexible electronics, systems biology, nanostructured materials and semiconductor scaling," said Dr. Mark W. Spong, dean of the Jonsson School and holder of the Lars Magnus Ericsson Chair in Electrical Engineering.

“The new faculty will also contribute directly to meeting the ambitious goals laid out in our recently completed 10-year strategic plan,” he added, “expanding our expertise in materials science and in analog electronics, and further building our young departments of bioengineering and mechanical engineering.”

The new faculty also demonstrate the school's continued progress toward its goal of joining the nation's top schools of engineering and computer science. Since 2003 the school's engineering and computer science faculty have gone from 78 members to 116. And the school's annual research expenditures recently topped $30 million, which is nearly 40 percent of the University's total research effort.

The new faculty are:

Dr. Yun Chiu, an associate professor of electrical engineering, received a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004. His research interests include VLSI signal processing, power electronics, device modeling and CAD, and wireline and wireless communications. He was previously an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He and fellow new faculty member Dongsheng Brian Ma are both affiliated with the Texas Analog Center of Excellence at UT Dallas.

Dr. Babak Fahimi, a professor of electrical engineering, received a doctorate in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University in 1999. His research interests include microscopic and macroscopic energy conversion, power electronics, and the modeling and stability assessment of multiconverter systems. Previously an associate professor of electrical engineering at UT Arlington, he received a Fulbright Scholarship earlier this year, which will allow him to conduct research next year at the Institute for Electric Machines in Germany.

Dr. Massimo Fischetti, a professor of materials science and engineering, earned a doctorate in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1978. His research involves the theory of electronic transport in semiconductors and the limits of semiconductor scaling. He was previously a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and prior to that he spent more than 20 years at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Dr. Lev Gelb, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, received a doctorate in theoretical chemistry from the University of Cambridge in 1995. His research interests concern molecular simulation in which he models chemical systems using powerful computers. The work provides a sort of virtual laboratory in which researchers develop an atomic-scale understanding of the behavior of complex systems. Previously an associate professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, he received a prestigious National Science Foundation Career Award in 2002.

Dr. Julia W.P. Hsu, a professor of materials science and engineering, received a doctorate in physics from Stanford University in 1991. Her research focuses on interfacial phenomena in organic-inorganic hybrid systems, the structure and electrical properties of self-assembled monolayers, and the chemical patterning of surfaces using conventional and soft lithographic techniques. She was previously a scientist in the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Sandia National Labs.

Dr. Hongbing Lu, a professor of mechanical engineering, received his doctorate in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology in 1997. His research interests include nano-indentation, visco-elasticity, experimental mechanics and the mechanics of nanostructured materials. He was previously the PACCAR Professor of Engineering at the University of North Texas, and prior to that he spent more than 10 years on the faculty of Oklahoma State University.

Dr. Dongsheng Brian Ma, an associate professor of electrical engineering, received his doctorate from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2003. His research focuses on developing core technologies for high-performance power-efficient integrated systems, and he is leader of the energy-efficiency research thrust within the Texas Analog Center of Excellence. He was previously an associate professor at the University of Arizona, where he founded the Integrated System Design Laboratory.

Dr. Lan Ma, an assistant professor of bioengineering, received her doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2004. Her broad research interests include applying control theory and dynamical systems theory to the studies of biological systems such as circadian rhythms. She was previously a research assistant professor in the Green Center for Systems Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, where she obtained systematic training in the biological sciences, learning the experimental skills needed for systems biology research.

Dr. Wooram Park, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering starting in January, is currently completing postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins University, where he is primarily working on needle steering for minimally invasive surgery. He received his doctorate in mechanical engineering from Johns Hopkins in 2008. His research interests are in biomedical robotics, computational structural biology, medical imaging and biomechanics. He brings important expertise in robotics, kinematics and dynamics.

Dr. Manuel Quevedo, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, received a doctorate in the field from the University of North Texas in 2002. He worked at Texas Instruments for five years before joining UT Dallas as a research professor. His research interests include the development, modeling and physical, electrical and chemical characterization of new materials and devices for flexible electronics. He is also an adjunct professor at both the University of North Texas and the University of Sonora in Mexico.

Dr. Walter Voit, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, received a doctorate in materials science and engineering from Georgia Tech in 2009. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from UT Dallas, where he was a Eugene McDermott Scholar. His research interests concern the thermomechanics of shape memory polymers, and he co-founded the company Syzygy Memory Plastics in 2007 to commercialize comfortable, well-sealing earplugs and earpieces based on shape memory polymer technology he developed during his graduate studies at Georgia Tech.