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Rice Engineering promotes 16 faculty

Accomplished faculty to take new roles as full professor, associate professor with tenure and associate teaching professor.

O'Connor building drone view

Sixteen members of the George R. Brown School of Engineering faculty at Rice have been promoted, including five to full professor, effective July 1.

“The School of Engineering is home to an impressive group of faculty whose sustained excellence has accelerated their careers. Their work is making an impact at Rice and beyond,” said Amy K. Dittmar, Howard R. Hughes Provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.

“Promotion is an important milestone and recognition of the faculty member’s accomplishments,” said Luay Nakhleh, William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Engineering. “We are proud of all our faculty who have been promoted and wish them continued success as they maintain this trajectory of excellence for many years at Rice.”

Promoted to full professor:
Daniel Cohan in civil and environmental engineering (CEE) earned his Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2004 and joined the Rice faculty in 2006. His research interests include photochemical modeling; pollutant impacts on human health; environmental policy and management; climate change mitigation; wind, solar and geothermal energy

Shiqian Ma in computational applied mathematics and operations research (CMOR) earned his Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research from Columbia University in 2011 and joined the Rice faculty in 2022. His research focuses on theory and algorithms for large-scale optimization and its applications in statistics and machine learning.

Aditya Mohite in chemical and biomolecular engineering (ChBE) earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Louisville in 2007 and joined the Rice faculty in 2018. He is the director of the Rice Engineering Initiative for Energy Transition and Sustainability (REINVENTS) and focuses on sustainable clean energy in energy generation with the goal of creating solutions for decarbonization. 

Omid Veiseh in bioengineering (BIOE), CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research, and director of the Rice Biotech Launch Pad earned his Ph.D. in materials science, engineering and nanotechnology from the University of Washington in 2009.  He joined the Rice faculty in 2017. His research interests include Innovating biomaterials for drug delivery and tissue engineering.

Yuji Zhao in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) earned his Ph.D. in ECE from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2012 and joined the Rice faculty in 2021. His research interests span electronic materials, advanced devices and nanotechnologies, with an emphasis on wide bandgap semiconductors for energy efficiency.

Promoted to associate professor with tenure:
Jesse Chan in CMOR earned his Ph.D. from the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. His research interests include numerical methods for partial differential equations and scientific computing. His recent work has focused on high-order finite element and discontinuous Galerkin methods.

Isaac Hilton in BIOE and CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research earned his Ph.D. in genetics and molecular biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013. His research interests include understanding the fundamental principles of human gene regulation and repurposing them to improve the ability to control cellular behaviors and combat human diseases.

Daniel Kowal in statistics (STAT) earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in statistics from Cornell University in 2015 and 2017, respectively, and joined the Rice faculty in 2017. His recent research focuses on Bayesian models for prediction and inference, decision theory, discrete data analysis and scalable approximations to complex models.

Anastasios Kyrillidis in computer science earned his Ph.D. in 2014 from the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and joined the Rice faculty in 2018. He works in optimization for machine learning, convex and non-convex algorithms and analysis and large-scale optimization.

Meng Li in STAT earned his Ph.D. in statistics from North Carolina State University in 2015 and joined the Rice faculty in 2017. His recent research has focused on the statistical modeling of data that arises in scientific and industrial applications such as images, functional data, networks and tree-structured data, with theoretical guarantees and scalable implementation.

Akane Sano in ECE earned her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 2015 and joined the Rice faculty in 2018. Her research includes data science and machine learning and human-centered intelligent systems for health and well-being and spans the fields of affective computing, ubiquitous and wearable computing, and biobehavioral sensing and analysis/modeling.

Santiago Segarra in ECE earned his Ph.D. in electrical and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and joined the Rice faculty in 2018. His research focuses on data science for networks; modeling, analysis, and design of networked systems; signal processing, machine learning, optimization, and algebraic topology applied to the understanding of networks and network data.

Thomas Senftle in ChBE earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Pennsylvania State University in 2015 and joined the Rice faculty in 2017. His research interests include the development and application of hybrid simulation techniques for modeling multi-component catalytic systems at quantum and classical scales.

Lauren Stadler in CEE earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2012 and 2016, respectively, and joined the Rice faculty in 2016. Her research focuses on wastewater-based epidemiology, environmental antibiotic resistance, wastewater treatment and resource recovery, and environmental synthetic biology.

Promoted to associate teaching professor:
Risa Myers in CS earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in CS from Rice in 2013 and 2016, respectively. She is interested in innovating in data science pedagogy. She develops interactive learning materials and brings lessons learned from research into the classroom in the form of examples, assignments and exercises.

Anne-Marie Womack in the Activate Engineering Communication Program earned her Ph.D. in English from Texas A&M University in 2011 and joined the Rice faculty in 2021. She is working on two projects: a book-length expansion of the Accessible Syllabus project and the co-authored Inclusive Teaching in College Classrooms for Routledge.
 

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