Berkeley Engineering welcomes eight new faculty members

Berkeley Engineering has added eight new faculty members to its roster. These tenure-track professors will bring their wide range of expertise to four departments across the college. 

Zaijun Chen, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences*

Chen received his Ph.D. in physics with the highest distinction from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is a principal investigator for the DARPA NaPSAC program in developing next-generation AI processors and is co-PI for the DARPA INSPIRED program for on-chip quantum sensing. 

Alex Dimakis, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences*

Dimakis earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from UC Berkeley, and he previously spent 12 years teaching at the University of Texas at Austin. His research spans information theory, generative AI and machine learning, and his previous projects involved big graph analytics, new erasure codes for big data storage, and learning sparse polynomials and causality. 

Claudio Hail, assistant professor of mechanical engineering

Hail completed his Ph.D. at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. His research will focus on leveraging nanoengineered optical materials and micro/nanomanufacturing to address clean energy technologies and global challenges ranging from new concepts for space travel and manufacturing quantum hardware to advancing imaging/sensing devices.

Jiyun Kang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering

Kang received her Ph.D. in materials science from MIT. Her research interests lie in the areas of physical metallurgy, manufacturing and in-situ microscopy, emphasizing the use of autonomous experimentation to develop advanced alloys with outstanding mechanical and environmental performance. 

Emma Pierson, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences* 

Pierson received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in computer science, and she previously worked as an assistant professor at Cornell Tech. She is focused on developing data science and machine learning methods to study two broad areas: inequality and healthcare. Her papers have delved into topics such as segregation, fair clinical prediction and inequality in pain. 

Manxi Wu, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering

Wu completed her Ph.D. in 2021 from the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT, and she previously worked as an assistant professor at Cornell University Operations Research and Information Engineering. Her research develops methods in game theory, multi-agent learning and optimization with applications in urban systems.

Mengjie Yu, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences*

Yu earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and she previously worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California. Her work aims to advance the fundamental understanding of nonlinear sciences at nanoscale, as well as realize next-generation optoelectronic circuits that could sit on our fingertips and solve real-life problems. 

Franco Zunino, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering

Zunino earned his Ph.D. in materials science from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. His research revolves around the development of novel, cementitious materials that are environmentally friendly. He is interested in time-resolved characterization methods of cement hydration, interaction of surfaces with polymers in cement paste, microstructural analysis through electron microscopy, and optimization of the production process of clinker and supplementary cementitious materials. 

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