UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Eleven new faculty members are joining the College of Engineering for the 2013-14 academic year.
The faculty members are:
- Sumeet Jumar Gupta, assistant professor of electrical engineering. Gupta's work focuses on low-power variation-aware VLSI circuit design, nano-electronics and spintronics, device-circuit co-design and nano-scale device modeling and simulations. He holds a bachelor's in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and a master's and doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University. Gupta will join the faculty in January 2014.
- Reuben Kraft, the Shuman Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Kraft’s research centers on computational mechanics, biomechanics, high-strain-rate behavior of materials, high-performance computing, injury biomechanics, dynamic failure mechanisms, shock physics, impact, constitutive and failure modeling, soft tissue physics and numerical methods for multiphysics coupling. He earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland and his master's and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering from John Hopkins University.
- Stephen Lynch, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. His research interests include turbomachinery aerodynamics and heat transfer, convective heat transfer, experimental diagnostic equipment for laminar-turbulent transition and turbulent boundary layers. He received his bachelor's in mechanical engineering from the University of Wyoming and his master's and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech.
- Ahmad Mirzaei, the Charles H. Fetter Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering. Before joining Penn State, Mirzaei was a senior principal scientist at Broadcom Corp. His expertise include RF-analog and mixed-mode integrated circuits and systems for broad range applications, such as wireless communications, sensors and medical devices. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Iran and his doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.
- Jacqueline O’ Connor, the Dorothy Quiggle Faculty Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. O'Connor's work centers on combustion, fluid mechanics, hydrodynamic stability and combustion instability. She received her bachelor's in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her master's and doctorate in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech.
- Jose Palacios, assistant professor of aerospace engineering. His work focuses on ice accretion physics, ice-protective coatings and model validation. Palacios received his bachelor's, master's and doctorate in aerospace engineering from Penn State.
- John Sampson, the Dorothy Quiggle Faculty Development Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. Sampson's research specializes in the design and implementation of novel architectures that make use of increasingly plentiful transistor resources to improve the energy-efficiency of executing code and to provide qualitatively new features in support of higher-level language constructs. He received his bachelor's in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and his doctorate from the University of California, San Diego.
- Paris von Lockette, associate professor of mechanical engineering. Her research interests include multifunctional materials development and devices, mechanics and polymer physics. She received her bachelor's in engineering science from Trinity University and her master's and doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan.
- Ming Xiao, associate professor of civil engineering. Xiao's research focuses on seepage and erosion, geotechnical earthquake engineering and geo-environmental engineering. He earned his bachelor's in civil engineering from Shangdong University in China, his master's in geotechnical engineering from Zhejiang University in China, his master's in computer science from Kansas State and his doctorate in geotechnical engineering from Kansas State.
- Nanyin Zhang, assistant professor of bioengineering. Zhang's work investigates the pathophysiology of brain disorders including stress-related disorders, schizophrenia and nicotine addition by using neuroimaging, behavioral and genetic models. He received his bachelor’s in biomedical engineering from Zhejiang University in China and his doctorate in biomedical engineering from the University of Minnesota.
- Minghui Zhu, assistant professor of electrical engineering. Zhu's work centers on the design, analysis and control of multi-agent networks with applications in multi-vehicle networks, transportation systems and the power grid. Zhu holds a bachelor's in mechanical engineering and automation from Zhejiang University in China, a master's in mechanical and automation engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a doctorate in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the University of California, San Diego.