Cem Tasan will join the faculty in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in January 2016. He holds a BSc and MSc from Middle East Technical University, both in metallurgical and materials engineering, and a PhD from Eindhoven University of Technology in mechanical engineering. Tasan was previously a group leader in adaptive structural materials at the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung, where he had also been a post-doc working on micro-plasticity at phase boundaries of multi-phase steels. He explores the boundaries of physical metallurgy, solid mechanics, and analytical microscopy in order to provide structural materials solutions to environmental challenges. His interests in micro-mechanically guided design of damage-resistant alloys and simulation-guided design of healable alloys have many applications for problems in energy and the environment.
Caroline Uhler joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society as an assistant professor in October 2015. She holds an MSc in mathematics, a BSc in biology, and an MEd in high school mathematics education from the University of Zurich. She obtained her PhD in statistics, with a designated emphasis in computational and genomic biology, from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and she received a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Humboldt Foundation and a START Award from the Austrian Science Fund. After a semester as a research fellow in the program on “Theoretical Foundations of Big Data Analysis” at the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley and postdoctoral positions at the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota, and at ETH Zurich, she joined IST Austria as an assistant professor. Her research focuses on mathematical statistics, in particular on graphical models and the use of algebraic and geometric methods in statistics, and its applications to biology.