College Announces Six
New Faculty Appointments

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For the third straight year, six new faculty members have joined the College of Engineering.  All six are assistant professors, with three in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, two in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and one in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

“Once again, we’re very pleased to be adding a group of well-qualified energetic young faculty to the College,” said Dean Eric Kaler.  “They were educated at a number of great schools, and we’re looking forward to their research, teaching, and service contributions to the College.”

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Xiaoming Li, Ryan M. Zurakowski, and Sylvain G. Cloutier are the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s newest faculty additions.

Li holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Nanjing University in China and a Ph.D. in the same field from the University of Illinois.  His research focuses on software/hardware optimization and code generation and optimization, including compilers and programming languages, in particular generating and optimizing code using machine learning techniques.  He was the recipient of two graduate fellowships at Illinois.

Zurakowski holds B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.  His areas of specialty include systems and computational biology, cancer dynamical modeling, and nonlinear control, exploring the intersection between control theory, mathematical biology, and medicine.  After completing his Ph.D., he served as a postdoctoral researcher for a year at UC-Santa Barbara and another year in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC-Irvine.

Cloutier received his BEng in Engineering Physics and his M.S. in Physics from Universite Laval in Quebec.  He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Engineering from Brown University.  Cloutier is interested in nanophotonics and biophotonics, and his work involves the optical characterization of nanoscaled materials.  He has two years’ experience as an R&D scientist in industry, working for Telops Inc.  Cloutier was the recipient of an NSERC Canadian Fellowship Award and an FCAR Industrial-Research Fellowship.

Department of Chemical Engineering

The Department of Chemical Engineering welcomed two new faculty members: Thomas H. Epps III and Millicent Sullivan.

Epps holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.  His research focuses on polymer science, including synthesis, structure, and phase behavior of block copolymers.  Epps held a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Research Council in 2004 and at MIT, he was an Entrepreneurial Competition winner for Natural Electric (NatEl) Hydropower.

Sullivan earned her B.S. in chemical engineering at Princeton University and her Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University.  Her research interests include nanoparticle formulations for gene delivery focusing on the design of drug delivery biomaterials that can accomplish cell and organelle-specific delivery of macromolecular therapeutics by tuned biodegradation.  She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Hope Heart Institute and recipient of a Clare Boothe Luce Graduate Fellowship.

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Chris Meehan joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering after earning his Ph.D. at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University and serving as a Visiting Researcher at the University of California, Davis.  Meehan is a geotechnical engineer whose research focuses on shear behavior of soils under static and dynamic loading conditions, including the development of soil and strength characterization methods that are practical, economical, and theoretically robust.  As a graduate student, he was the recipient of a United States Society on Dams Scholarship and a Via Master's Fellowship Award Winner.  He is a member of Chi Epsilon, the Civil Engineering Honor Society.

by Diane Kukich