Top row, from left: Serina Chang, Aditya Muppala, Kay Ousterhout, Manuel Sabin, Giuseppe Loianno, Amy Pavel. Bottom row, from left: Jason Lee, Sewon Min, Rishabh Iyer, Sagar Karandikar, Lijie Chen. Berkeley Engineering welcomes 11 new faculty members
This fall, UC Berkeley Engineering welcomes 11 new faculty members to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, which is shared with the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society.
Serina Chang, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and of computational precision health*
With a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford, Chang’s research is centered on developing AI and graph methods to study human behavior, improve public health and guide data-driven policymaking.
Lijie Chen, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences
Chen earned a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, then worked as a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow alongside Avishay Tal and Umesh Vazirani at Berkeley. Their research interests include theoretical computer science, especially in relation to complexity theory, quantum physics and AI safety.
Rishabh Iyer, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences
Iyer earned his Ph.D. in computer science from EPFL, Switzerland. His work focuses on “developing techniques that enable engineers to build systems with well-understood performance and functionality.”
Sagar Karandikar, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences
A three-time Berkeley alum, Karandikar received his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer sciences. His research interests include hardware/software co-design for hyperscale cloud systems to improve hyperscale datacenter/warehouse-scale computer (WSC) performance, energy efficiency and total cost of ownership.
Jason Lee, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and of statistics
With a Ph.D. in computational and applied mathematics from Stanford, Lee previously worked as an associate professor at Princeton and a researcher at Google Deepmind. His research interests are in the theory of machine learning, optimization and statistics. Among his achievements: the Samsung AI Researcher of the Year Award, NSF Career Award and Sloan Research Fellowship.
Giuseppe Loianno, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences
Loianno’s Ph.D. in robotics comes from the University of Naples Federico II. He previously worked as a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and an associate professor at New York University, where his Agile Robotics and Perception Lab focused on developing autonomous machines that can navigate on their own using only on-board sensors.
Sewon Min, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences
Min earned her Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington. Her research interests include natural language processing and machine learning, with a focus on large language models.
Aditya Muppala, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences
Muppala earned a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Michigan, where he received two College of Engineering awards for his excellence in teaching and research. His specialties include electromagnetics, integrated circuits and imaging.
Kay Ousterhout, assistant teaching professor in electrical engineering and computer sciences
Ousterhout graduated with a Ph.D. in computer science from Berkeley, where she was a member of the NetSys Lab. Her thesis focused on understanding performance in data analytics frameworks.
Amy Pavel, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences
Pavel, who earned her Ph.D. in computer science at Berkeley, previously worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. Her primary research goal is to make technology-mediated communication more efficient and accessible, especially for people with disabilities.
Manuel Sabin, assistant teaching professor in electrical engineering and computer sciences
Sabin received a Ph.D. in computer science at Berkeley while advised by Shafi Goldwasser and Christos Papadimitriou. Their research interests include fine-grained complexity theory, pseudorandomness, cryptography, circuit lower bounds and how these all influence each other.
*Computational Precision Health is a joint program shared by UC Berkeley and UCSF.