New Faculty - IRA A. Fulton School of Engineering

Metin Akay
Professor, Harrington Department of Bioengineering
Dr. Akay joins the faculty from Dartmouth College, where he was an associate professor of engineering and adjunct associate professor of computer science. He earned his M.S. in electrical engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey and his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Rutgers University. He has played a key role in promoting biomedical education by writing and editing several books and giving more than 50 keynote, plenary, and invited talks at international meetings including the first, second, and third Latin-American Conferences on Biomedical Engineering. He was the first chair of the steering committee of the IEEE Transaction on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and a recipient of the IEEE EMBS Service, a IEEE Third Millennium Medal, and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Early Career Achievement Award. He also received the Young Investigator Award of the Sigma Xi Society, Northeast Region in 1998 and 2000. Dr. Akay's Neural Informatics and Wearable Technologies labs investigate the effect of developmental abnormalities on the respiratory neural networks during maturation and the dynamics of motor function in Parkinson and post-stroke disease subjects.

Christopher Buneo
Assistant Professor, Harrington Department of Bioengineering
Dr. Buneo joins the faculty from the California Institute of Technology where he was a postdoctoral fellow and later a senior research fellow in the Division of Biology. He earned his M.S. in physical therapy from Long Island University and his Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Minnesota, where he was awarded the Bacaner Research Award and the Allan Hemingway Endowed Scholarship upon graduation. Dr. Buneo's interests span the fields of rehabilitation, neuroscience and engineering. Included in his publications are articles addressing the role of the parietal lobe of the brain in the control of movement, which have appeared in Science, Nature and the Annual Review of Neuroscience.

Junseok Chae
Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering
Dr. Chae received his doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 2003 where he was a research fellow until joining ASU. His M.S. degree is also from the University of Michigan. His areas of interest include micro/nano electro-mechanical systems technology, micro-fluidic systems, bio-micro electro-mechanical systems, and the interface of bio- or nano-devices. He was a finalist in the 2002 Pryor-Hale Plan Competition of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He won the first place award in the 2001 Student Design Contest at the Design Automation Conference. Dr. Chae has numerous journal publications and two patents.

Yi Chen
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Yi Chen received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on database and data stream management for web data and scientific data. She has worked on XML data storage, indexing, query processing and optimization techniques for databases and streams, data model and query language design. She plans to develop a new graduate course on Web data management. Dr. Chen’s main research interests include database systems, data streams, Web data and scientific data management.

E. Aykut Dengi
Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering
Dr. Dengi received his doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997. His master’s degree is also from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to coming to ASU he was an engineering director at Cadence Design Systems and primary investigator for the UltraSYN project under the DARPA NeoCAD Program. He has also been director of Neolinear, Inc., and manager of the Interconnect Design Systems Laboratory at Motorola, Inc. and has held several other positions at Motorola in Austin and Tempe starting in 1994. His areas of interest include electronic design automation for analog, RF, and mixed signal systems; electromagnetic simulation; electronic circuit and system simulation; signal integrity of digital, analog, RF, and mixed-signal designs; and interconnect and integrated passive device modeling and simulation. Dr. Dengi has numerous journal papers and six patents.

Dijang Huang
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Dr. Dijiang Huang received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Dr. Huang conducts research involving security issues related to security: key management, authentication protocol, secure key agreement protocol, attacks analysis, and attack resilient network design. He also conducts research in computer networking that is associated with network routing protocol, mobile user mobility model, ad hoc/sensor network, and network infrastructure survivability design. He is the 2004 recipient of UMKC’s distinguished Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Dissertation Award, School of Computing and Engineering.

Bahar Jalali-Farahani
Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering
Dr. Jalali-Farahani received her doctorate in electrical engineering from Ohio State University in 2005. Her M.S. is from the University of Tehran. She served as a teaching assistant and lecturer while at Ohio State. She had internships at Freescale Semiconductor and General Electric. Her areas of interest include CMOS analog, RF and mixed signal circuits, SoC design, multi-standard wireless systems, digitally calibrated - ADC, and wideband multi-standard - converters. Dr. Jalali-Farahani’s honors include the SRC/SIA student contest in 2005 and the Outstanding Graduate Student Award, University of Tehran, Department of ECE, where she was ranked the top student in the class of 1999 and presented her work at numerous conferences.

Marco Janssen
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Dr. Marco Janssen received his doctorate from Maastricht University in the Netherlands in 1996. Dr. Janssen develops computational models to study emergent phenomena in social and social-ecological systems in cooperation with a variety of disciplines (archaeology, psychology, economics, political science, and ecology). This includes foraging of hominids, the rise and fall of ancient societies, innovation diffusion, and governance of ecosystems. The computational modeling is performed in combination with human subject experiments and case study analysis. Dr. Janssen is especially interested in the fundamental system characteristics of what makes systems robust.

Joohyung Lee
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Dr. Joohyung Lee received his doctorate in computer sciences from the University of Texas, Austin in 2005. His research interests include artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, logic programming, answer set programming, commonsense reasoning, and nonmonotonic logics. His research focuses on applying mathematical logic to automating intellectual mechanisms in humans. Dr. Lee is working on formal methods for representing commonsense knowledge about actions and on foundations of answer set programming and nonmonotonic logics.

Gary O’Brien
Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering
Dr. O’Brien received his doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 2004. His master’s degree is from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Previous to coming to ASU, he worked at Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola Semiconductor) in the Sensor and Analog Products Division beginning in 1994. At Freescale he was the principal staff electrical engineer. His areas of interest include electronic circuits and systems and micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) sensors. Dr. O’Brien has numerous publications and has been issued 6 patents with 5 pending.

Jonathan D. Posner
Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Posner received his doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Irvine in 2001 with a specialization in thermal sciences and combustion. Prior to joining the faculty at ASU, he was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Dr. Posner’s research interests are microscale transport phenomena, fluid dynamics, electrokinetics, and optical diagnostics as they apply to the physics and design of micro/nanofluidic bioanalytical and energetic devices. Dr. Posner was honored as a fellowship student in Belgium for his excellence in experimental research by the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics and his work has appeared on the cover of Applied Optics and the Journal of Microfluidics and Nanofluidics. Dr. Posner is an avid sailor who was honored as a Collegiate All-American at University of California, Irvine where he also served as head sailing coach.

Harvey Thornburg
Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering
Dr. Thornburg received his doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2005. His master’s degree is from Harvey Mudd College. He was active in designing and teaching in the Department of Music at Stanford University . He has worked as a research consultant at Shazam Entertainment. He also has work experience at Opcode Systems and Qualcomm, Inc. His areas of interest include sound modeling, music information retrieval, audio feature extraction and segmentation, auditory scene analysis, and digital audio effects. Dr. Thornburg was awarded the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics Affiliates Scholar Fellowship at Stanford University for three consecutive years. He has numerous publications and conference presentations.

Simon Washington
Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Dr. Washington received his doctorate from the University of California, Davis in civil engineering, with an emphasis on transportation. Prior to joining ASU he was a member of the civil engineering faculty at the University of Arizona and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Washington’s research and teaching interests include safety, transportation planning, travel behavior, and research design and statistical methods. Over the past 10 years, Dr. Washington has been a principle investigator or co-principle investigator on over seven million dollars of externally supported research related to transportation safety and planning. He has managed and conducted safety research for the Federal Highway Administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the National Academies, and the Arizona, California , and Georgia Departments of Transportation. Dr.  Washington is the primary author with Drs. Karlaftis and Mannering on a textbook entitled Statistical and Econometric Methods for Transportation Data Analysis. Dr. Washington is author or coauthor of over 30 peer-reviewed technical papers and has advised 12 doctoral and 17 master’s students.

Jieping Ye
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Dr. Ye received his doctorate from University of Minnesota , Twin Cities in computer science and engineering. His research interests include machine learning, data mining, and bioinformatics. In 2004, his paper on generalized low rank approximations of matrices won the Outstanding Student Paper Award at the Twenty-First International Conference on Machine Learning.

Hongbin Yu
Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering
Dr. Yu received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Texas, Austin in 2001. His master’s degree is from Peking University. Most recently he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles. His areas of interest include nanostructure and nano-device fabrication and characterization, transport in nanostructures and molecules, quantum size effect in metallic and semiconductor nanostructures, surface and interface physics and chemistry, and advanced scanning probe microscopy. In 2001 he was awarded the Graduate Research Award from the American Vacuum Society. He has numerous publications and conference presentations and has given invited talks at several major universities.