Max Shulaker joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor in July. He received his BS, master’s, and PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford, where he was a Fannie and John Hertz Fellow and a Stanford Graduate Fellow. Shulaker’s research focuses on the broad area of nanosystems. His Novel Electronic Systems Group aims to understand and optimize multidisciplinary interactions across the entire computing stack — from low-level synthesis of nanomaterials, to fabrication processes and circuit design for emerging nanotechnologies, up to new architectures — to enable the next generation of high performance and energy-efficient computing systems.
Matteo Bucci will join the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) faculty as an assistant professor in the fall of 2016. He received his PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Pisa in Italy in 2009. A research scientist in NSE since 2015, Bucci was previously at Commissariat à l’énergie atomique in France, where he led several research projects in experimental and computational thermal-hydraulics for light water reactors and sodium fast reactors. His research will focus in two main areas: heat transfer nanoengineering innovations to improve the safety and economic competitiveness of nuclear reactors, and advanced diagnostics and intelligent systems to improve situational awareness, fault detection and diagnostics, and anticipated failures in nuclear power plants. Bucci is an active member of the Consortium for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, one of the MIT’s eight Low-Carbon Energy Centers.
Jennifer Rupp will join the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2017. She studied at the University of Vienna before receiving a PhD in Materials at ETH Zurich. Rupp is a French and German native and is currently an assistant professor of electrochemical materials at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. She was a researcher at the National Institute of Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, in 2011, and previously collaborated with MIT professors Tuller and Yildiz. Her research is primarily in solid-state information memory systems, energy storage, and energy harvesting devices. She has worked on new material architectures and ionic transport-structure relations for solid-state ionic conductor thin films, electrochemistry and system aspects for memristors, solid-state batteries, solar-to-fuel conversion, and micro-fuel cells. Rupp’s awards include “top 40 scientist speaker under the age of 40” at the World Economic Forum, Spark Award for most innovative and economic invention by ETH Zurich, and Kepler Award for New Energy Materials by the European Academy of Science.
David Sontag will join the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in January 2017 as an assistant professor. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science at UC Berkeley and his PhD in computer science at MIT, where he worked in Professor Tommi Jaakola’s group on approximate inference and learning in probabilistic models. Sontag is currently an assistant professor of computer science and data science at New York University. Previously, he was a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England. At MIT, his research will focus on machine learning and probabilistic inference, with a particular focus on applications to clinical medicine. He is currently developing algorithms to learn probabilistic models for medical diagnosis directly from unstructured clinical data, automatically discovering and predicting latent (hidden) variables.
Carmen Guerra-Garcia will join the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics as an assistant professor in the fall of 2017. Graduating from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid with an aeronautical engineering degree in 2007, Guerra-Garcia then matriculated in the Space Propulsion Laboratory at MIT. She completed her PhD with a concentration in plasma physics and propulsion and a minor in numerical methods in 2014. Following a one-year postdoctoral position with Professor Paulo Lozano, Guerra-Garcia relocated to Boeing Madrid for a year. Her research will focus on the study of plasmas for aerospace applications, including plasma-assisted combustion, space propulsion, and lightning strikes on aircraft.
Ali Jadbabaie joined the MIT faculty as a full professor with dual appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society in July 2016. He is currently the JR East Professor of Engineering, the director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, and the associate director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT. He is also a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. Jadbabaie received his BS from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, his MS in electrical and computer engineering from the University of New Mexico, and his PhD in control and dynamical systems from Caltech. After a year as a postdoc at Yale University, he joined the faculty at University of Pennsylvania in July 2002. At Penn he was named an associate professor with tenure in 2008, a full professor in 2011, and the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Network Science in 2013. He also held appointments in computer and information science and operations as well as information and decisions in the Wharton School of Business. Jadbabaie is the inaugural editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, an interdisciplinary journal sponsored by several IEEE societies. He is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Career Award, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. In 2015, he received the Vannevar Bush Fellowship (formerly known as National Security Science and an Engineering Faculty Fellowship) from the office of Secretary of Defense. Jadbabaie’s students have won and been finalists of numerous best paper awards at various ACC and CDC conferences. He is also an IEEE fellow. He has made foundational contributions to the field of collective autonomy and opinion dynamics, and his current research interests include the interplay of dynamic systems and networks with specific emphasis on multi-agent coordination and control, distributed optimization, network science, and network economics.
Adam Belay will join the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor in July 2017. He holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, where he was a member of the secure computer systems group and the multiscale architecture and systems team. Previously, he worked on storage virtualization at VMware Inc. and contributed substantial power-management code to the Linux Kernel project. Belay’s research area is operating systems and networking. Much of his work has focused on restructuring computer systems so that developers can more easily reach the full performance potential of hardware. He received a Stanford graduate fellowship, a VMware graduate fellowship, and an OSDI Jay Lepreau best paper award.
Guy Bresler joined the faculty in July 2015 in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society; he will also be a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. Bresler received his BS in electrical and computer engineering and an MS in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his PhD from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and was subsequently a postdoctoral associate at MIT. He is the recipient of an National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship, a Vodafone graduate fellowship, the Barry M. Goldwater scholarship, and the Roberto Padovani Award from Qualcomm. Bresler’s research interests are at the interface of statistics, computation, and information theory. A current focus is on understanding the relationship between combinatorial structure and computational tractability of high-dimensional inference in graphical and statistical models.
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.