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Francisco Valero-Cuevas |
Six new faculty will join the Viterbi School of Engineering this fall: Francisco Valero-Cuevas of Cornell University’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department; Joe Qin of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin; Andrea Hodge of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Dongxiao Zhang of the Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering at the University of Oklahoma; Murali Annavaram of Intel Corp., Austin, Texas; and Noah Malmstadt from the Department of Bioengineering at UCLA.
Associate professor Francisco Valero-Cuevas specializes in the neurophysiological and mechanical functioning of human hands and improving current treatments for hand injuries. He joins the Viterbi School’s Biomedical Engineering Department and the Biokinesiology Department of the School of Dentistry.
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Joe Qin |
Valero-Cuevas received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 1997. Shortly thereafter, he joined the core faculty of the Biomechanical Engineering Division at Stanford University before going to Cornell University.
Professor Joe Qin has accepted joint appointments in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering and the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
Qin specializes in process systems engineering and, specifically, in semiconductor production processes. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Maryland and joined the University of Texas at Austin faculty in 1995, where he was associate chair and holder of the Paul D. and Betty Robertson Meek and American Petrofina Foundation Centennial Professorship in Chemical Engineering.
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Murali Annavaram |
Assistant professor Andrea Hodge, who will join the Department of Aerospace and Mechancal Engineering, has been a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CA, since earning her Ph.D. in 2002 in materials science and engineering from Northwestern University.
Her interests lie in nanomechanics, nanocrystalline materials processing, high temperature mechanics, thin and thick film coatings, biomaterials mechanics and foam processing.
Hodge was selected as a symposium chair at the 2006 Biological Materials Science Symposium and is a member of the Materials Science Society and Materials Society.
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Andrea Hodge |
Assistant professor Murali Annavaram will join the Viterbi School's Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering from the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California. Prior to his work at Nokia, Annavaram was a senior researcher at the Intel Microarchitecture Research Lab in Austin, Texas.
He did his graduate work at the University of Michigan, where he earned his Ph.D. and worked with professor Ed Davidson on prefetching techniques for databases. Currently, Annavaram has four patents pending in microarchitecture and variation-tolerant designs.
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Dongxiao Zhang |
Professor Dongxiao Zhang has an appointment in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and in the USC Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Sciences.
Prior to joining USC, he was the Miller Chair professor at the Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering of University of Oklahoma from 2004 to 2007. From 1996 to 2004 he was a senior scientist and team leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Zhang has also served as a Chang Jiang Chair professor at Nanjing University and is the founding associate dean at the College of Engineering of Peking University in China. Zhang is an expert in stochastic partial differential equations and their applications to hydrology and reservoir simulations. He received his M. S. and Ph.D. degrees, both in hydrology, from the University of Arizona, in 1992 and 1993, respectively.
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Noah Malmstadt |
Assistant professor Noah Malmstadt has joined the Viterbi School’s Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Sciences. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Biohybrid Microsystems Laboratory in UCLA’s Department of Bioengineering.
Malmstadt’s research focuses on the temporal and spatial control of self-assembly processes. Currently, he is designing novel device architectures for the automated fabrication and stabilization of membrane proteins, which will contribute to new techniques in drug screening, biosensing and basic protein physiology.
He did his undergraduate work at the California Institute of Technology, and received his Ph.D. in bioengineering in 2003 from the University of Washington, Seattle.
