WISE New Faculty

USC Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) will include three new Viterbi professors

Michelle Povinelli

Michelle Lynn Povinelli is an optics/photonics specialist studying light propagation in nanostructured materials. Currently, she is working on the problem of “slow light,” which involves the design of tiny devices that could trap light pulses and hold them for a while before releasing them. These devices could be useful for optical communications, such as fiber-optic networks, which are used to deliver internet traffic.

“We are delighted to have Michelle onboard in electrical engineering,” says P. Daniel Dapkus, electrophysics chair of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering. “She will be pursuing research at the cutting edge of nano-device technology, with an emphasis on applications at the intersection of optics, biomedicine and information science.”

Povinelli, who had been a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, says researchers have achieved some impressive results in slow light in atomic gasses, but the systems they have developed are bulky and don’t work at the wavelength range used for optical communications.

“I am trying to design microfabricated, ‘on-chip’ devices, which means nano-devices built on a silicon chip similar to a computer chip, that are more practical for engineering applications, using nanofabrication techniques,” she says.

The photonics scholar did her undergraduate work in physics at the University of Chicago, then worked abroad one summer as a researcher at the University of Kyushu, in Japan, and later as a Churchill Scholar at the University of Cambridge, in England. She continued her graduate work in optics and photonics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a Ph.D. in physics in 2004.

Shinyi Wu

The Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering welcomed Shinyi Wu, who specializes in health-care systems analysis. Formerly at the RAND Corp., Wu was principal investigator on a project to analyze the cost-effectiveness of physical activity intervention programs in the treatment and prevention of cancer.

“Shinyi has focused her professional career on identifying and applying fundamental industrial engineering tools and techniques to solve important process-improvement problems associated with the health-care industry,” says Epstein Department Chair James E. Moore, II. “Her appointment in our department is representative of an emerging focus on health-care applications that speaks directly to USC’s strategic objectives. We couldn’t wait for her to join us.”

Wu did her undergraduate work at Chung Yuan Christian University in Taiwan, earning a bachelor of science degree in industrial engineering in 1992. She went on to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she earned a Ph.D. in 2000 in industrial systems, with an emphasis on health-care systems. She joined the RAND Corp. in 1999 and, most recently was an engineer in the Health Program & Technology and Applied Sciences Group, and associate director of RAND’s Roybal Center for Health Policy Simulation.

Recently, Wu was honored by RAND for “outstanding contributions to furthering RAND’s mission of improving policy and decision-making through research and analysis.”

Andrea Hodge

Andrea Hodge joined the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering in the fall, after working as a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. While at Lawrence Livermore, she mentored Reed Doucette, a senior mechanical engineer in the department and a new USC Rhodes Scholar for 2008. Her interests lie in nanomechanics, nanocrystalline materials processing, high-temperature mechanics, thin and thick film coatings, biomaterials mechanics and foam processing.

Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department Chair Michael Kassner says “the Viterbi School of Engineering is very fortunate to have successfully recruited Andrea. She was heavily recruited by many top-tier universities, but she chose USC because of the very favorable professional environment. Already, Andrea has had unusual success in many of her research endeavors.”

Hodge is a member of the Materials Science Society. During her tenure at Lawrence Livermore, she was a chair for the 2006 Biological Materials Science Symposium.

She earned her Ph.D. in 2002 in materials science and engineering from Northwestern University.