CSULB College of Engineering Adds Seven New Faculty

New faculty joining the CSULB College of Engineering this fall include researchers with expertise in accessible STEM education, bioimplantable medical devices, water resources, materials that respond to their surroundings, computer security and architecture, and social media data.
 
Dr. Siavash Ahrar joins the CSULB Biomedical Engineering Department as an assistant professor, after earning a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from University of California Irvine, working as a postdoctoral researcher in the UCI Department of Physics, and serving as a Science and Engineering Education Fellow (SEEF) with the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University.
His work focuses on studying and developing an active and accessible STEM education for all learners. His research focuses on developing automation tools and their application to bioengineering, including mili and microfluidics and simple autonomous machines. During his graduate studies, Dr. Ahrar developed autonomous microfluidics (i.e., pneumatic computers) that could lead to the independent operation of laboratory tools and point-of-care diagnostics.
 
Dr. Ava Hedayatipour joins the CSULB Department of Electrical Engineering as an assistant professor after completing her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. She holds a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University in Iran.
Dr. Hedayatipour’s current research interests include analog integrated circuit designs, bio-implantable and biomedical devices, low- power and low-noise designs, microelectronics, mixed-signal VLSI designs, and hardware security. During her graduate studies, she developed the first integrated secure multimodal sensor. In this design, she used low-power blocks to implement impedance and temperature sensor, with security fabricated with a Lorenz chaotic circuit. Her impedance sensor has also been used to detect thoracic impedance and hand gestures. Her recent work in designing a printable electrode enables individuals to do electrochemical experiments in remote locations.
 
Dr. Laurie Huning joins the CSULB Department of Civil Engineering and Construction Engineering Management as an Assistant Professor after obtaining a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2017 and working as a National Science Foundation (NSF) Earth Science postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine.
Dr. Huning’s research aims to better characterize hydrologic processes as they interact with both natural and human systems. She combines remote sensing with physical and statistical approaches to improve hydrologic estimation, water resources management, and extreme event (e.g., droughts, floods) and cascading hazard mitigation across a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Her research addresses global water resources problems by linking the fields of hydrometeorology, climatology, remote sensing, and modeling together.
 
Dr. Ji-Hwan Kang, who will be joining the CSULB Chemical Engineering Department as an assistant professor, holds a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on developing soft active materials that respond to their surroundings for dynamically reconfigurable, intelligent systems.
The research applies a multidisciplinary approach to create bio-inspired, programmable deformation and instability towards smart sensing/actuating platforms such as untethered soft robotics, mechanical logic gates, adaptive porous surfaces, and drug delivery systems. Recently, he designed new types of shape-morphing materials with tunable mechanical properties for robust self-folding, light-driven motion, and self-limiting assembly.
 
Dr. Ehsan Madadi joins the CSULB Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering as an Assistant Professor after receiving his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Iowa State University in 2017 and working as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering and the Center for Water and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin.
His research focuses on the development, implementation, and validation of accurate and tractable computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools for multiphase and turbulent flows, and environmental fluid modeling. He has generated new computational algorithms that improve our ability to model complex physical processes of fluid flow and transport for computational modeling of multiphase, turbulent mixing, and reacting flows.
 
Dr. Amin Rezaei joins the CSULB Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor after obtaining his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Northwestern University. He also holds master’s degrees in Computer Science from University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Computer Engineering from Shahid Beheshti University.
Dr. Rezaei has a dozen years of experience in computer science and Hailu Xuengineering research with a focus on hardware security and computer architecture. He helps the high-tech industry thrive and contribute to economic prosperity and innovation. Dr. Rezaei is the recipient of an Academic Excellence Award from University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and Walter P. Murphy Fellowship and Royal E. Cabell Fellowship awards from Northwestern University.
 
Dr. Hailu Xu will join the CSULB Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science after obtaining his Ph.D in Computer Science from Florida International University and interning at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Xu’s research focuses on systems, with particular emphasis on online social stream data processing, big data processing, and stream processing.
He has designed and implemented systems for analyzing social stream data, handling security issues in social networks, recovering failures of states in stream systems, and supporting applications in the cloud or edge environment. Dr. Xu is also interested in solving security issues in edge and cloud computing, guaranteeing stream applications in the edge environment, and identifying the threats (e.g., fake news, rumors, social bots) from online social networks.