College adds 24 new faculty, increasing hires to 45 over three years

The College of Engineering has added 24 new faculty for 2019-20, increasing total faculty hires to 45 over the past three years.

Among the new faculty is Marilyn Wolf, the new chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Wolf was previously on the faculty at Georgia Tech and Princeton and earned three degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford.

The new faculty will be working on the college's three campuses: City and East campuses in Lincoln and Scott Campus in Omaha.

Motassem Al-Tarazi, Assistant Professor of Practice
Computer Science and Engineering (City Campus)

Al-Tarazi’s research includes cloud computing, data centers, optimization, energy saving and big data.

Mona Bavarian, Assistant Professor
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (City Campus)

Bavarian’s research includes the reaction kinetics of organosiloxane polycondensation, the polymerization reaction of specialty polymers and design of electrochemical systems.

Christopher Bohn, Assistant Professor of Practice
Computer Science and Engineering (City Campus)

Bohn’s areas of interest include parallel and distributed computing, software engineering and computer science education.

Tami Brown-Brandl, Professor and Dr. William E. and Eleanor L. Splinter Chair
Biological Systems Engineering (East Campus)

Brown-Brandl’s research includes improved animal well-being and production efficiency: precision animal management, prediction of individual animal susceptibility to heat stress, calorimetry and animal energetics and development of sensors and control systems.

Shruti Daggumati, Assistant Professor of Practice
Computer Science and Engineering (City Campus)

Daggumati’s research includes the intersection of machine learning, data visualization, and computational linguistics, and non-linear stochastic models applied to the identification of ancient scripts.

Matteo D’Alessio, Research Assistant Professor
Civil and Environmental Engineering (City Campus)

D’Alessio’s research focuses on water-quality concerns, including the impact of injected air on the transport of pharmaceutical compounds in recycled agricultural water, riverbank filtration, and the leachability of treated wastewater. 

Saeed Eftekhar Azam, Research Assistant Professor
Civil and Environmental Engineering (City Campus)

Eftekhar Azam’s research includes machine learning, Bayesian system identification, large-sale experiments, high-performance computing and smart infrastructure monitoring.

Lucia Fernandez-Ballester, Assistant Professor
Mechanical and Materials Engineering (City Campus)

Fernandez-Ballester’s research focuses on polymers and the rational design of materials and processing with optimal properties. Her specific areas of interest include the interplay between molecular structure, processing, and final properties; conducting polymers; additive manufacturing; polymers for biomedical applications; and flow-induced crystallization.

Mohammad Ghashami, Assistant Professor
Mechanical and Materials Engineering (City Campus)

Ghashami’s research includes micro- and nanoscale heat transfer, near-field thermal radiation, energy conversion, nanoscale thermal transport, thermionics and thermoelectric power generation, near-field thermophotovoltaics, and radiation manipulation. 

Nirnimesh Ghose, Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering (City Campus)

Ghose’s research includes security issues as they relate to wireless networks, physical layers, cyber-physical systems, the Internet-of-Things, and aviation, and the interaction between cyber security and social networks.

Piyush Grover, Assistant Professor
Mechanical and Materials Engineering (City Campus)

Grover’s research includes combining geometric and statistical methods in dynamics with optimization and control theory to enable optimal design and control, large-scale multi-agent/swarm robotics, and fluid mechanics.

Congrui “Grace” Jin, Assistant Professor
Civil and Environmental Engineering (City Campus)

Jin’s research includes construction materials, structural mechanics, porous structures, concrete structures, contact mechanics, fracture mechanics, wave propagation, and computational mechanics. 

Kyungki Kim, Assistant Professor
The Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction (Scott Campus)

Kim’s research includes Building Information Modeling (BIM), Immersive Augmented Reality (AR) for construction education and training, construction safety and health, and real-time sensing for construction operation monitoring. 

Abdelghani Laraoui, Assistant Professor 
Mechanical and Materials Engineering 

Laraoui’s research includes quantum sensing and nanoscale probing of condensed matter phenomena and defect discovery and spectroscopy in two-dimensional materials and wide bandgap semiconductors. 

Jennifer Lather, Assistant Professor
The Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction (Scott Campus)

Lather’s research includes interactive workspaces to support integrative project delivery and collaborative teams, quantitative layout planning and optimization, stochastic simulation for healthcare operations, and design to support data-driven decision making.

Marc Maguire, Assistant Professor
The Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction (Scott Campus)

Maguire’s research includes accelerated bridge construction, integrating sustainability, energy efficiency and structural performance, and non-destructive testing, computer vision, and machine learning in structural engineering. 

Adam Page, Assistant Professor of Practice
The Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction (Scott Campus)

Page has 14 years of construction and project management experience and five years legal department/in-house counsel experience for ENR-ranked AE firms, and has been in project management and construction administration. 

Kurt Palik, Assistant Professor of Practice
Mechanical and Materials Engineering (City Campus)

Palik has five years of experience in manufacturing engineering and process design, 15 years in design engineering and project management, and 18 years in engineering management.

Sorab Panday, Research Professor
Biological Systems Engineering (East Campus)

Panday’s research includes model codes of water resources and subsurface systems, especially groundwater flow, unsaturated zone, surface water/groundwater interactions, solute fate and transport, along with reactive transport, heat transport and resource management. 

Grace Panther, Assistant Professor Civil and Environmental Engineering (City Campus)

Panther’s research includes engineering education with a focus on spatial visualization, teamwork and gender, and authentic engineering practice.

Benjamin Riggan, Assistant Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering (City Campus)

Riggan’s research includes computer vision, image and signal processing, biometrics and forensics, machine learning, and domain adaptation.

Tirthankar Roy, Assistant Professor
Civil and Environmental Engineering (Scott Campus)

Roy’s research is primarily focused on hydrologics, including process understanding, modeling, and forecasting across scales, remote-sensing applications, and risk assessment of extremes. 

Hyun-Seob Song, Associate Professor
Biological Systems Engineering (East Campus)
Food Science and Technology (Innovation Campus)

Song’s research includes metabolic modeling, microbial interaction modeling, omics data-model integration, and model-driven metabolic and microbiome engineering. 

Marilyn Wolf, Professor and Department Chair
Computer Science and Engineering (City Campus)

Wolf’s research includes cyber-physical systems, the Internet-of-Things, embedded computing, embedded computer vision, and VLSI systems.