Faculty News

New Faculty

George Biros,
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics

George joined Penn Engineering in September from a Visiting Scientist post at Sandia National Labs and a Postdoc appointment at Courant Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Computational Science and Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. George’s research interests include: computational science and engineering; computational fluid and solid mechanics; parallel computing; optimization algorithms and their application to control, inversion and design; numerical methods for integral and partial differential equations in mathematical physics; and bioengineering.

Matthew Blaze,
Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science

Matt will join Penn in January 2004. He currently is a research scientist at AT&T Laboratories. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University. Matt’s research focuses on the architecture and design of secure systems based on cryptographic techniques, analysis of secure systems against practical attack models, and on finding new cryptographic primitives and techniques.

Shu Yang,
Skirkanich Term Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering

Shu will join Penn in January 2004 from a Technical Staff post at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University. Her research interests include synthesis, processing and characterization of novel nanostructures designed to exhibit unique electronic, photonic and sensing capabilities.

Awards and Honors

Rajeev Alur has been appointed the inaugural Zisman Family Professor of Computer and Information Science. Rajeev received his bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 1987 and his doctorate degree from Stanford University in 1991. He began his career with six years as a member of the technical staff of Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, before joining Penn in 1997. Rajeev’s work on tools for design, specification and analysis of reactive systems spans from theoretical foundations in formal logic and automata theory to applications in network protocols and embedded controllers.

Scott Diamond has been appointed the inaugural Arthur E. Humphrey Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Scott received his bachelor’s degree in 1986 from Cornell and his PhD in 1990 from Rice. He taught at SUNY Buffalo before joining Penn in 1997. Scott works on cardiovascular therapeutic technologies in several key areas: mechanobiology, blood clot dissolving therapies, blood coagulation, drug discovery, and nonviral gene therapy.

Eduardo Glandt has been appointed the Robert D. Bent Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

Michael Kearns was named a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Vijay Kumar was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Amir Roth received an NSF Career Award for his work entitled “Correctness Performance Partitioned Architectures.”

Saswati Sarkar received an NSF Career Award for her work entitled “Realizing the Potential of Wireless ad hoc Networks through Holistic Resource Allocation.”

Lawrence Saul received an NSF Career Award for his work entitled “Statistical Methods for Dimensionality Reduction in Machine Learning.”