Destination: The Future
AN INITIATIVE TO ELEVATE USC ENGINEERING

26 New Tenure-Track Faculty
USC Engineering is in a Growth Mode

From left to right: Bhaskar Krishnamachari; Konstantinos Psounis, Michael Kassner, Maria Yang, Hossien Hashemi

By Carl Marziali

Ah, good old 2001, 2002, and 2003: the boom years of plentiful academic vacancies, robust growth and endless optimism.

Sound odd? Not if you happen to be one of 26 tenure-track faculty hired by the USC Viterbi School of Engineering over the past two years. While other colleges struggled with new realities like government cutbacks and shrinking endowments, USC Engineering has bucked the trend.

The school’s expansion since 2001 is unprecedented in its history and rare even among top universities in recent years. Dean C. L. Max Nikias is almost halfway to the ten-year goal in the School’s strategic plan to increase the number of tenure-track faculty by 60.
The expansion started out looking more like a contraction when Nikias took over as dean in July, 2001. Facing some of the same problems as his counterparts all over the country, he declared a six-month budget freeze and began a massive reorganization of the school. The reorganization focused on reducing administration in the School and redirecting resources to faculty.

It worked. At the end of those six months, the school’s reserves were healthy enough to provide start-up packages for several new hires. After rewarding existing faculty with a one-time salary adjustment and a year-end raise, averaging about nine percent in total, the School was off and hiring. Spectacular enrollment growth in graduate programs, particularly those available through the Distance Education Network (DEN) provided additional resources, as did ongoing fundraising efforts ($70 million since 2001).
“We’ve got the money to be extremely competitive and securing top-tier faculty has been our priority,” says the dean. “At a time that everybody else is facing the squeeze, either to stay at the size where they are or to downsize, we are in a growth mode.”

He predicts that by the next decade, the years 2001-2003 will be recognized as a period when USC Engineering took another big jump forward. Department chairs agree they are seeing a significant increase in the quality of the faculty applicant pool. Conversely, in his position as the final interviewer Nikias talked to about 135 applicants, every one of whom mentioned USC’s current eighth-place rank in the U.S. News & World Report survey of graduate engineering schools.

Not that a top-10 ranking in a magazine is all you need to attract the right researchers. School faculty talked up positions at conferences and other events in the engineering community. Nikias wrote personal letters to the top 30 faculty in each engineering discipline, as ranked by USC Engineering faculty, asking them to recommend promising candidates. And if the right candidate still did not materialize, the School would simply wait.

“We don’t have openings, I don’t allocate positions,” says the dean. “We identify critical areas where we want to recruit faculty, and then I authorize searches in those areas. But if we don’t find a truly top-notch person in that area… you may try again the following year.”
More important than how top faculty were hired, is why. Simply put, faculty are the nutrients of the body academic. In a growing body, food provides the energy for expansion. As the body grows it requires more nutrients, which in turn help the body develop further, and so on to maturity.

In a growing academic body, top new faculty conduct important research, raising the school’s reputation. As the School’s reputation rises, higher quality students seek an opportunity to learn from the school’s faculty. When they graduate, those students attract superior employment offers. As friends and alumni of the school notice the increase in quality, they in turn increase their support… as do granting agencies, foundations and corporations. As resources pour in, the school is able to attract more top faculty, thereby attracting more quality students, and so forth in an upward spiral of success.

When he became dean, Nikias focused his hiring on two major initiatives: information technology and biomedical technology. A $10 million gift from Daniel J. Epstein, a USC trustee and member of the School’s Board of Councilors, provided additional resources for the newly renamed Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. The dean’s latest focus will be the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, which has a new chair this year.

The School also made a special effort to locate candidates from under-represented groups, extending several offers to women and minority candidates. The candidates who accepted include four women and one male of Hispanic descent. But fifteen offers were made to top-notch women and minority candidates.

“We had five who accepted, thus our yield rate was thirty percent,” says the dean. “We want to do better in the future.”

The drive to hire more tenure-track faculty is only part of the School’s expansion. For every tenure-eligible academic, the School has added two new research professors, adjuncts or lecturers. These include Paul Debevec, a research assistant professor who created the special effects technology used in the first Matrix movie; Laura Marcu, a research associate professor of biomedical engineering, working on molecular imaging; Ann Chervenak, a research assistant professor computer science working on grid computing at the Information Sciences Institute and Jennifer Swift, a research assistant professor specializing in earthquake engineering in civil engineering.

Of the new tenure-track faculty, 11 are tenured professors. The more These senior faculty members have the following specialties:

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Rajiv Kalia, Aichiro Nakano and Priya Vashista together head one of the world’s leading supercomputing groups, specializing in advanced computational simulations. Recruited jointly by USC Engineering and the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences (LAS), the researchers came to USC from Louisiana State University, where they had moved in turn from Argonne National Laboratory. All three have joint appointments in the School and the College. The professors brought with them seven post-doctoral researchers, ten graduate students and a systems manager. Though the research group owns a 166-node supercomputer, it also plans to work with the 320-node supercomputer at the USC Center for High Performance Computing and Communications. The group has developed software to visualize billions of atoms of material at once, allowing simulations of formerly nebulous processes. The main goal has been to achieve greater strength in ceramic materials and greater speed in electronic devices, but the research has wider applications in nanotechnology, materials, molecular biology, pharmacology and bioengineered systems.

“We put on the USC on the map in the area of high-performance computing. It’s an expertise that as a university we didn’t have,” says Nikias.

Cauligi S. Raghavendra is a professor of electrical engineering, formerly at The Aerospace Corporation. He is also the new chair of Electrical Engineering – Systems. Raghavendra’s current research focuses on wireless and sensor networks, energy efficient algorithms and protocols and active networks. He is conducting pioneering work in the area of power aware protocols for wireless communications.

Leana Golubchik is associate professor of computer science. Previously she was at the University of Maryland and at Columbia University. Golubchik directs the Internet Multimedia Laboratory at USC and is an expert in Internet-based computing, multimedia systems, and computer systems modeling & performance evaluation. She is a winner of the National Science Foundation Career Award, the IBM Doctoral Fellowship, and the NSF Doctoral Fellowship. At USC, Golubchik designed the new M.S. in computer science with a specialization in security, one of the nation’s first. She will teach core courses in the program, offered remotely through DEN starting this fall.

Ramesh Govindan, associate professor of computer science, is one of the world’s leading authorities on communication networks. He developed several software systems, including Internet route flap dampening, E-BGP Route Server software, and the Mercator Internet mapping tool, which are used in the Internet today. He is the director of USC’s Embedded Networks Laboratory and co-principal investigator on the NSF-sponsored Center for Embedded Networked Systems.

Sven Koenig is an associate professor of computer science formerly from Georgia Tech. His research centers on ways to enable situated agents (such as robots or decision-support systems) to behave intelligently in their environments in real time, even when they have incomplete knowledge of their surroundings, imperfect abilities to manipulate their environment, limited perception or insufficient reasoning speed. Koenig is a winner of the NSF Career Award and an IBM Faculty Partnership Award.

Milind Tambe is an associate professor of computer science and has been the PI or co-PI in research grants totaling $7 million. His research interests include multiagent systems, specifically multiagent teamwork, agent-human interactions and distributed negotiations. He won the 2002 Best Paper award at the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagents, and has been a trustee of the RoboCup Robot Soccer Federation.

BIOMEDICAL TECHNOLOGY

Norberto M. Grzywacz, professor of biomedical engineering, was formerly at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco. His research involves combining experimental techniques with computational modeling to study visual perception and neural processing in the retina. A “key senior faculty” according to Nikias, Grzywacz heads the Visual Processing Laboratory and directs USC’s new Center for Vision Science and Technology.

K. Kirk Shung, professor of biomedical engineering, has earned the nickname “Mr. Ultrasound” with 30 years of groundbreaking research in biomedical ultrasound technology. Internationally recognized as one of the top five researchers in the field, Shung came to the School from Penn State, bringing with him the Ultrasonic Transducer Research Center. UTRC is the nation’s only center for the development of ultrasonic transducer/array technology for medical diagnostics. The first 30 MhZ transducer/array was created in Shung’s laboratory. Shung also brings with him five graduate students, four research staff, an engineer and a technician.

AEROSPACE AND MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

Michael Kassner, professor of mechanical engineering and material sciences, is the new chair of the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. He was formerly at Oregon State University and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Kassner is currently pursuing research on creep, fracture, fatigue and thermodynamics. His research is supported by grants from NSF, the Basic Energy Sciences of the Department of Energy, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Michael Kassner is truly a leader,” says Nikias, adding that USC plans to hire additional faculty for AME in the near future.

ASSISTANT PROFESSORS

Todd Brun
Specialty: Quantum computing and quantum information theory
Department: Electrical Engineering – Systems
Doctorate from: California Institute of Technology (physics, 1994)

Elaine Chew
Specialty: Computational models for musical design
Department: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Doctorates from: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (operations research, 2000)

Hossein Hashemi
Specialty: Nanotechnology
Department: Electrical Engineering
Doctorate from: California Institute of Technology (what field? Year?)

Tzung Hsiai
Specialty: Diagnostic micro- and nano-sensors for fundamental cardiovascular research
Department: Biomedical Engineering / Cardiovascular Medicine
Doctorate from: University of California – Los Angeles (biomedical engineering, 2001), University of Chicago (doctor of medicine, 1993)

David Kempe
Specialty: Randomized and graph algorithms and decentralized communication protocols
Department: Computer Science
Doctorate from: Cornell University (computer science, 2003)

Bhaskar Krishnamachari
Specialty: Fundamental principles and the analysis and design of protocols for next-generation wireless sensor networks
Department: Electrical Engineering, Computer Science
Doctorate from: Cornell University (electrical engineering, 2002)

C. Ted Lee
Specialty: Responsive surfactant systems (systems tunable through manipulation of an external variable, allowing nano-level control of surfactant structure)
Department: Chemical Engineering
Doctorate from: University of Texas (chemical engineering, year not provided)

Krishna Nayak, Assistant professor of electrical engineering, is an expert in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). He holds a joint appointment with the Keck School of Medicine at USC.

Michael Neely
Specialty: Analysis and control of data networks with applications to satellite and wireless systems
Department: Electrical Engineering? (check)
Doctorate from: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (electrical engineering, expected 2004)

Fernando Ordóñez
Specialty: Optimization algorithms, high performance computing, applications of optimization
Department: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Doctorate from: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (operations research, 2002)

Banu Özden
Specialty: General systems, including multimedia storage systems, Quality of Service (QoS) support in operating systems, and storage networking and services
Department: Computer Science
Doctorate from: University of Texas (computer science? 1995)

Konstantinos Psounis
Specialty: Networking solutions based on probabilistic methods
Department: Electrical Engineering – Systems
Doctorate from: Stanford University (electrical engineering, 2002)

Pin Wang
Specialty: Biosynthetic methods for engineering novel proteins for applications in human health, specifically glycobiology, molecular medicine, tissue engineering, and gene delivery
Department: Chemical Engineering
Doctorate from: California Institute of Technology (chemical engineering, 2003)

Maria Yang
Specialty: Information technology for facilitating the design and manufacturing process
Department: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Doctorate from: Stanford University (mechanical engineering, 2000)

Jesse Yen
Specialty: Development of novel diagnostic ultrasound systems and ultrasonic array transducers
Department: Biomedical Engineering
Doctorate from: Duke University (biomedical engineering, 2003)