Five Named to Chairs

Two senior, three junior faculty become endowed chair holders

Dean Yannis Yortos has announced the appointment of five outstanding members of the faculty to endowed chairs. Two of the appointments went to senior faculty, and three to exceptionally promising junior members.

Joe Qin

Professors Joe Qin and Don Zhang will hold the newly created Fluor Professorship in Process Engineering and the Marshall Professorship in Engineering Technology chairs, respectively.

Qin, an expert in control systems in chemical engineering, joined USC in the fall of 2007 as a professor in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, with joint appointments in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering and the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the DuPont Young Professor Award, a Halliburton/Brown & Root Young Faculty Excellence Award, an NSF-China Outstanding Young Investigator Award, and an IFAC Best Paper Prize for a model predictive control survey paper published in Control Engineering Practice. Prior to joining USC, he was an associate chair and holder of the Paul D. and Betty Robertson Meek and American Petrofina Foundation Centennial Professorship in Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin.

Don Zhang

Zhang, who also joined the Viterbi School in fall of 2007, is a professor in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and holds a joint appointment in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. Previously, he was a senior scientist and team leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He held the Miller Chair at the Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering at the University of Oklahoma from 2004 to 2007. Zhang has also served as Chang Jiang (guest chair) Professor at Nanjing University and was the founding associate dean at the College of Engineering at Peking University in China.

He is an expert in stochastic partial differential equations and their applications to hydrology, reservoir simulation and the sequestration of carbon dioxide in geological formations as a viable option for mitigating greenhouse gas effects.

David Kempe

Yortsos also announced the appointment of three exceptional young faculty members—David Kempe of computer science, Ellis Meng of biomedical engineering, and Hossein Hashemi of electrical engineering—to endowed early career chairs.

Kempe, who was named to the Robert G. and Mary G. Lane Early Career Chair, has distinguished himself in computer science theory and the design and analysis of algorithms, with a particular emphasis on social networks, distributed network algorithms, and game theoretic and pricing questions. He was the recipient of a 2006 National Science Foundation Early Career Award for his work to model and algorithmically address ways of minimizing or maximizing the spread of network epidemics, such as computer viruses. He is also a recipient of the Viterbi School Junior Research Award and, with computer science colleague Sven Koenig, is one of the organizers of the USC Programming Contest, an ongoing effort to identify and support programming talent for competition in Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) contests.

Ellis Meng

Meng, who has done outstanding work in bioMEMS fabrication at the Viterbi School’s Biomimetic Microelectronic Systems NSF Engineering Research Center, has been named to the Viterbi Early Career Chair. She has done novel work with polymer-based bioMEMS, and has developed tiny microchannel networks that integrate pumps, valves and sensors into spaces smaller than a fingertip. These devices may be used to understand the complex pathways in the brain or allow physicians to implant devices that can monitor a patient’s medications.

Hossein Hashemi

Hossein Hashemi, who was named to the Gordon S. Marshall Early Career Chair, works in the field of radio frequency integrated circuits and systems. He was the co-recipient of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits 2004 Best Paper Award, and recipient of the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Symposium Lewis Winner Award for Outstanding Paper in 2007. Hashemi currently serves as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-Part I: Regular Papers, and has been an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems—Part II: Express Briefs.

“These early career chair awards recognize and support research that has distinguished young faculty and could lead to significant advances in their respective fields,” Yortsos noted.