Jacobs School Hires 15 Faculty in Key Focus Areas

The Jacobs School recently hired 15 new faculty, strengthening UCSD’s expertise in nanotechnology and embedded systems, structural damage diagnostics, and optical networking and sensors. Other new hires enhance focus areas of bioinformatics, data mining and machine learning, computer graphics and network systems.

An expert in the area of materials and nanotechnology, Sungho Jin has joined the School’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department as the Kazuo Iwama Professor of Materials Science. A National Academy of Engineering member, Jin specializes in ultra-small materials for many applications including implantable medical devices and optical networks.

Research in sensor networks is increasingly critical to environmental and critical infrastructure monitoring, and the School further strengthened its Department of StructuralEngineering with the addition of Michael Todd, who specializes in damage diagnostics and using sensor technologies to monitor the health and performance of naval, civil, and aerospace structures.

Two additional faculty with expertise in optical networks joined the School’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. George Papen specializes in fiber optic communications systems while Joseph Ford focuses on optical devices for applications including data storage, telecommunications, and optoelectronic computing. The ECE department also added two faculty in the area of signal processing. Nuno Vasconcelos specializes in signal processing, computer vision, and pattern recognition and works on retrieval of images, video, audio, speech, or DNA sequences. Curt Schurgers works on power-efficient embedded systems for sensor and signal networks.

The Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department leads this year’s recruitment with six new faculty. Strengthening the Jacobs School’s focus on nanotechnology and networking is Rajesh Gupta, Qualcomm Professor of Embedded Microsystems. Gupta is an expert in embedded systems and mobile computing, including the integration of software and hardware to make computers more portable and energy efficient. Alex Snoeren also joins the department and adds expertise in computer systems with a focus on secure and robust wide-area mobile computing.

The CSE Department enhanced its computer graphics and machine vision program with two new faculty: David Kriegman is a widely cited expert on face recognition, a crucial component
of vision-based security systems. Henrik Wann Jensen specializes in rendering of realistic images of natural phenomena. In the area of data and pattern recognition, Sanjoy Dasgupta focuses on machine learning and uncovering patterns in high dimensional data such as genomic information and environmental data. Alin Deutsch specializes in integrating data from multiple sources.

The Department of Bioengineering added two experts in bioinformatics and systems biology. Jeff Hasty engineers gene networks in order to gain insight into gene regulation and the control of cell function. Xiaohua Huang focuses on nanotechnology devices for massive parallelization and miniaturization of biochemical reactions and biomolecular analyses. The department also hired Wayne Giles, whose appointment further enhances the strong ties between Bioengineering and the School of Medicine in molecular cardiology and cardiovascular engineering. Giles studies the electrical impulses and chemical signals that control heart beat.