Berkeley Engineering welcomes new faculty to campus

August 22, 2024 by Marni Ellery

This fall, Berkeley Engineering welcomes six new tenure-track and teaching professors, who will bring their teaching and research expertise to more than a half-dozen engineering departments.

Yuan Cao, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences* and of physics
Cao obtained his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT. His primary research interests include the electrical, optical and mechanical properties of low-dimensional materials, and how to engineer these properties and find applications for them using cross-disciplinary approaches, including nanotechnology, metamaterials and microelectricalmechanical systems (MEMS).

Huiwen Jia, assistant professor of industrial engineering and operations research
Jia received her Ph.D. in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests include robust and stochastic optimization and online learning algorithms, with applications in sustainable and resilient transportation design and revenue management.

Ken Kamrin, associate professor of mechanical engineering
Kamrin received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT. His research interests include theory and modeling of granular media, gas- and liquid-sediment mixture modeling, computational methods for soft media and multiphase problems, and analytical techniques and model reduction.

Phillip Kerger, assistant teaching professor of industrial engineering and operations research
Kerger completed his Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on optimization, classical and quantum algorithms, and complexity.

Pierluigi Nuzzo, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences*
Nuzzo received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from UC Berkeley. His research interests revolve around high-assurance design of cyber-physical systems and systems-on-chip, including methodologies and tools for the design and certification of dependable artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, electronic design automation, and secure and trustworthy hardware design.

Eleanor Tubman, assistant professor of nuclear engineering
Tubman received her Ph.D. in plasma physics from the University of York. She is an experimental physicist working on laser-driven fusion and laboratory astrophysics.

*The EECS department is shared by the College of Engineering and the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society.