In This Issue:

SEAS Welcomes New Faculty

One of the measures of the strength of an academic institution is its ability to continue to attract top-notch faculty. For several years now, Columbia Engineering has been in the enviable position of being able to hire both senior and junior faculty in every department. This semester, eight new faculty members were welcomed by Dean Zvi Galil, and, for the spring 2007 semester, another new faculty member will join them.

“Our School is able to choose from among the best new academicians world-wide and we have successfully recruited extraordinarily talented teachers and researchers,” said Dean Galil. “They come from many different countries and mirror the diversity that is present in our student body.” The new faculty members come from England, India, Iran, Israel, Italy and Mexico as well as the United States.

Biomedical Engineering

Assistant Professor Elizabeth M. C. Hillman is founding the “Laboratory for Functional Optical Imaging” that will develop new tools for imaging living tissue using light. Light can detect changes in oxygenation (from changes in the color of blood) and changes in other absorbers and fluorophores naturally occurring in the body, making it valuable as a diagnostic imaging tool. It can reveal functional information about the health of tissue and, when used with new optical dyes, be used to target specific types of cells, such as cancer. Optical imaging uses low levels of light that are not harmful to tissue and the cost typically is less expensive than other medical imaging techniques, such as x-rays and MRIs. One challenge will be to overcome the effects of scattering, which limits light penetration and imaging resolution. Her laboratory initially will focus on applications of optical imaging and microscopy to brain imaging, cardiac imaging and skin imaging with future applications to include endoscopic imaging (e.g. diagnosing colon cancer).

She was previously an Instructor at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston, and obtained her Ph.D. in Medical Physics and Bioengineering from University College London, UK.

Chemical Engineering

Professor Sanat K. Kumar has been a professor of materials science and chemical engineering at Pennsylvania State University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He focuses his research on complex fluids, concentrating on novel uses of synthetic polymer-based materials, including polymer nanocomposites and polymers used in fuel cells; biopolymer systems, working on self-assembly of proteins and developing better methods for separating biological macromolecules; and systems with ultra-slow dynamics, particularly glass and reversibly gelling materials such as gelatin.

“While these themes overlap in some research projects,” he said, “we are always guided by applications and by the need to establish their fundamental underpinnings.” Professor Kumar is collaborating with several faculty members in SEAS and in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, as well as with a broad range of researchers at other academic institutions and industrial research laboratories.

A graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Prof. Kumar received the D.Sc. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Civil Engineering & Engineering Mechanics

Assistant Professor Nicola Chiara specializes in risk and decision analysis, stochastic modeling and optimization of infrastructure systems. His research interests include investigation of risk mitigation instruments for infrastructure project finance and real estate; option theory and its application in complex infrastructure and engineering systems; risk assessment in asset management and project management of engineering systems.

He graduated summa cum laude from Universita’ degli Studi di Palermo (Italy), received the M.S. in Civil Eng. from the University of Texas, the M.S. in Quantitative Finance and Risk from Bocconi University (Italy) and the Ph.D. from Columbia. Computer Science

Computer Science

Assistant Professor Itsik Pe’er studies, develops and applies novel computational methods in human genetics, answering questions such as: How is it best to measure, describe and quantify differences between individual DNA sequences? How does sequence variation affect biological processes? How can we use it to understand and influence human disease? “All these questions pose complex analytical challenges, with direct impact on medical research,” he said, “and specifically, I am interested in genetics of special populations that underwent bottleneck and admixture events, in the optimal implementation and analysis of whole genome association studies, and in the interplay between somatic and germline variation.”

Prof. Pe’er is a graduate of Tel Aviv University, where he received his B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees. He did postdoctoral research at the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Broad Institute, and Whitehead Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Electrical Engineering

Assistant Professor Azita Emami-Neyestanak’s numerous research interests cover a wide range of topics in integrated circuits and systems. In particular, she is interested in developing new analog, digital and system-level solutions for building complex electronic systems in the future highly-scaled technologies.

“Data communication in systems, such as computer servers and multi-processors is increasingly difficult,” she said. “At Columbia, I will continue my research in the area of mixed-signal design for chip-chip and intra-chip data transmissions.” She will explore use of optical and wireless techniques as well as enhancement of traditional signaling over wires. She also will expand her research to non-traditional integration techniques, which eventually allow 3D structures. A graduate of Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, she received the M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford. Prior to joining the SEAS faculty, she was with IBM’s T.J. Watson Research lab.

Assistant Professor Ioannis Kymissis’ work is about making electronic systems that match the form factor of the application. For example, if there is a need for something big, cheap, or flexible, or something that has an unusual combination of functionalities, such as emitting and sensing light at the same time, conventional silicon technology often isn’t up to the task because its optoelectronic functionalities are limited and it is hard and expensive to make large silicon devices. By using advanced processes and low-temperature materials such as organic semiconductors and amorphous oxides, Prof. Kymissis can make a range of new devices to address these unmet system and application needs. “Circuits and devices can be made near room temperature; a range of different devices can be stacked and work together, and we can build these devices on large substrates with favorable properties (such as flexibility or low weight) instead of being locked into wafers and tiny, brittle, crystalline chips,” he said. “We also continue to learn more about how to process and handle these materials by learning more about how they grow and function.”

Prof. Kymissis received S.B., M. Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral associate at MIT’s Laboratory for Organic Optics and Electronics prior to coming to SEAS.

Industrial Engineering & Operations Research

Associate Professor Maria Chudnovsky works in graph theory and combinatorial optimization, studying objects called “graphs,” a collection of points, called “vertices,” such that some pairs of points are “adjacent” and others are not. In many cases, a set of data can be conveniently viewed as a graph. For example, take a graph whose vertices are train stations, and two vertices are adjacent if and only if there is a direct train running between the two stops. Now, finding a quick way to get between two points can be formulated as an abstract problem about graphs. The Internet can also be viewed as a graph. “What I do is study properties that graphs have,” said Dr. Chudnovsky. “While it is sometimes difficult to come up with immediate applications of cutting edge graph theory theorems to any practical problems, graph theory in general is a useful tool in computer science and operations research.”

Prof. Chudnovsky graduated summa cum laude from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, majoring in mathematics, and received the M.Sc. from Technion in Mathematics prior to studying at Princeton, from which she received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics. She was an assistant professor of mathematics at Princeton prior to joining the SEAS faculty.

Mariana Olvera-Cravioto’s research interests are in stochastic systems relating to queues, where the processing times of jobs have a heavy-tailed distribution (possibly infinite moments), and in stochastic processes in general, from a theoretical point of view.

She is a graduate in applied mathematics from Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico and holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford, with a concentration in operations research.

For the Spring 2007 semester, Rama Cont, associate professor of applied mathematics at Ecole Polytechnique and a senior academic fellow at Europlace Institute, will be an associate professor in the IEOR Department. He holds a diplome de l’Ecole Polytechnique, a degree in Chinese studies and advanced and doctoral degrees from Universite de Paris XI in Orsay. He is the author of Financial Modelling with Jump Processes. His interests include stochastic modeling of financial time series, Lévy processes and applications, stochastic partial differential equations and applications, stochastic analysis in infinite dimensions, and interest rate modeling.