Faculty & Staff
Welcoming Our New Faculty for 2024
This year, Columbia Engineering brings on a new cohort of researchers poised to make a big impact.
Sixteen new faculty joined Columbia Engineering in 2024 reflecting a broad range of research areas that address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. These scholars and teachers are tackling sustainable water treatment, more efficient data processing, new and dynamic materials, Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME), magnetic resonance elastography (MRE), nanoscale DNA assemblies, applied mathematics and applied probability, game theory, building safe AI systems, linear programming theory, mineral engineering, and robotics. Meet this year’s new faculty.
Adeyemi Adeleye
Adeyemi Adeleye joined the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2024. Adeleye earned his PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2015 where he also did a one-year postdoctoral research. He was a National Research Council Research Associate at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory, Narragansett, RI from 2016 to 2018. Prior to Columbia, Adeleye was a principal investigator in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on understanding surface interactions involving persistent contaminants in the natural environment, and sustainable water treatment and environmental remediation.
Liliana Borcea
Liliana Borcea joined Columbia Engineering in July 2024 as the George P. Livanos Professor of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics . She earned her PhD (1996) in scientific computing and computational mathematics at Stanford University and her BS (1987) in applied physics from the University of Bucharest in Romania. Borcea has received many honors, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023), multiple NSF fellowships early in her career, the SIAM SIGEST award (2012), the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky prize (2017), and the Rothschild Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences of Cambridge University (2023). Prior to Columbia, Borcea was the Peter Field Collegiate Professor of Mathematics at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she had taught since 2013. Prior to this, she worked at Rice University and the California Institute of Technology, with visiting professorships across the globe at Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo in Firenze, Italy; Stanford University; and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France. Borcea’s research is in applied mathematics. She is particularly interested in wave propagation in random media with applications to inverse wave scattering and free space optical communications; inverse problems for hyperbolic, elliptic, and parabolic partial differential equations; and data-driven reduced order modeling and applications to inverse problems.
Aravind Devarakonda
Aravind Devarakonda joined the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics as an assistant professor in January 2024 and is affiliated with Columbia's Quantum Initiative . Devarakonda obtained his PhD in physics from MIT in 2021 and his BS in applied sciences and engineering at Rutgers University in 2014. He joined Columbia University as a postdoctoral research scientist and Simons Junior Fellow in the Department of Physics. Devarakonda and his group use tools and techniques from solid-state chemistry, nanoscience, and low-temperature physics to study the quantum mechanical behavior of matter. His group is particularly interested in creating materials hosting unusual ground states emerging from the interplay of electron-electron interactions and topology. Ultimately the Devarakonda lab aims to detect, manipulate, and harness these ground states towards future applications in quantum information science and beyond. He was recently named a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Fellow in Materials Synthesis.
Neil Dolinski
Neil Dolinski joined the Department of Chemical Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2024. Dolinski received his PhD in materials from the University of California Santa Barbara (2019) and his BS in materials science and engineering from Rutgers University (2013). He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the use of dynamic bonds to make, break, and rearrange polymers and networks.
Micah Goldblum
Micah Goldblum joined the Department of Electrical Engineering as an assistant professor in July 2024. He received his PhD in mathematics at the University of Maryland in 2020. Before his current position, Goldblum was a postdoctoral research fellow at New York University. Goldblum’s research focuses on fundamental and applied problems in artificial intelligence, including (1) AI safety, (2) mathematical and computational tools for understanding how AI systems work, and (3) automating data science. He is introducing a new course this semester on generative AI and modern deep learning.
Anran Hu
Anran Hu joined Columbia Engineering as an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research in July 2024. She completed her PhD from Industrial Engineering and Operations Research College of Engineering at University of California Berkeley (2022) and obtained her BS degree from School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University (2016). She was a Hooke Research Fellow in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford. Hu works at the intersection of stochastic control, game theory, optimization, machine learning and financial engineering. A main focus of her research is on the reinforcement learning, optimization formulation and innovative modeling of large-population games and stochastic control systems. One of her current major goals is to enhance the model capacity, practical applicability and scalability of control and games. Anran is teaching IEOR4500 Applications Programming for Financial Engineering this semester.
Tanvir Ahmed Khan
Tanvir Ahmed Khan joined the Department of Electrical Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2024. He received his PhD in computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan in 2023 and his MSc (2017) and BSc (2014) in computer science and engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. His research brings together computer architecture, compilers, and operating systems to enable efficient data center processing. Consequently, his work has been adopted by Intel and ARM to improve the performance of data center applications. Bridging hardware and software, his research appears in venues like ISCA, MICRO, ASPLOS, OSDI, PLDI, FAST, and EuroSys. His work has also been recognized with the 2024 ACM SIGARCH/IEEE CS TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award, IEEE Micro Top Picks 2023 distinction, DATE 2023 Best Paper Award Nomination, and MICRO 2022 Best Paper Award.
Yunzhu Li
Yunzhu Li joined the Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor in July 2024. Li obtained his PhD in computer science from MIT in 2022 and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2020 and a BS in computer science from Peking University in 2017. Prior to Columbia, he was an assistant professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a postdoc at the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. Li’s work stands at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, with the goal of helping robots perceive and interact with the physical world as dexterously and effectively as humans.
Tianyi Lin
Tianyi Lin joined the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research as an assistant professor in July 2024. He received his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley in 2023, a MS in operations research from UC Berkeley in 2017, a MS in pure mathematics and statistics from University of Cambridge in 2012, as well as a BS in mathematics from Nanjing University in 2011. Before coming to Columbia University, Lin was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. Lin works at the intersection of game theory, machine learning, optimization and networks. His recent interests lie in: Economics of Artificial Intelligence and Large-scale Equilibrium Computation. Notably, he has built on simple and basic social learning models by considering whether the advanced technological tools (e.g., ChatGPT) nudge the consensus belief closer to the truth. This semester, he is teaching IEOR E4007, titled Optimization Models and Methods for Financial Engineering.
Marianna Maiaru
Marianna Maiaru joined the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics as an associate professor in January 2024. In 2013, she received her PhD in aerospace engineering and her Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in 2008 as a collaboration between Politecnico di Torino in Italy and the University of Michigan. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Washington and the Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Michigan. Prior to Columbia, she was an associate professor in the mechanical engineering department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. An expert in Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME), virtual manufacturing, and computational mechanics, her research interests include composite structures, damage mechanics, multi-scale analysis, higher-order finite elements, and additive manufacturing. Maiaru has received numerous grants from NASA, NSF, and the Air Force, including the AFOSR Young Investigator Program award in 2020 and the NSF CAREER award in 2022. She received the DEStech Young Researcher Award in 2021 and the AIAA ICME Prize in 2020 and 2022.
Grace McIlvain
Grace McIlvain joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2024. McIlvain received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering in 2022 and MBA in 2018 from the University of Delaware, where she also received her BS. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology and a junior fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. She won the NIH Outstanding Scholars in Neuroscience Award in 2022. McIlvain conducts research in quantitative medical imaging techniques and applications. Her laboratory focuses on the development of techniques for noninvasive imaging of brain tissue mechanical properties, with applications in study brain tumor cellularity, neurodegenerative disease, microstructural damage from traumatic brain injury, and structure-function relationships in the developing brain. McIlvain applies these techniques in a clinical setting through partnerships with the Columbia Department of Radiology Neurological Institute and also to study brain mechanical development in healthy children with colleagues at the Zuckerman Mind Brain and Behavior Institute.
Bento Natura
Bento Natura joined the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research as an assistant professor in July 2024. Natura earned his PhD in mathematics from the London School of Economics in 2022. Prior to his doctoral studies, he obtained both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from the University of Bonn in 2017. Natura has held postdoctoral research positions at Georgia Tech, Brown University, and UC Berkeley. Natura’s research is primarily centered on algorithms, optimization, and game theory, with a specialized emphasis on the theory of linear programming. He is particularly interested in exploring the application of continuous methods, especially in convex optimization, to solve combinatorial problems that model a wide range of practical challenges.
Sakul Ratanalert
Sakul Ratanalert is a senior lecturer in discipline in the Department of Chemical Engineering , joining Columbia in January 2024. He obtained a BS in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in 2011 from Cornell University, and an MS in Chemical Engineering Practice in 2014 and a PhD in Chemical Engineering in 2018 from MIT. Prior to Columbia, he was a senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. Ratanalert’s PhD research focused on nanoscale DNA assemblies. His current research in education includes developing engaging learning activities and building students' intuition and conceptual understanding. He also serves as co-director of Masters Studies in Chemical Engineering. This semester he is teaching Senior Design, Essentials Thermodynamics, and The Art of Engineering's Chemical Engineering Project.
Nuttida Rungratsameetaweemana
Nuttida Rungratsameetaweemana joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering as an assistant professor in July 2024. She has a PhD (2020) and a MS (2016) in neuroscience from University of California, San Diego; and a BA (2014) in mathematics and neuroscience from Middlebury College. She was a provost research fellow at Columbia University, a visiting postdoctoral scientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a Swartz Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and a postdoctoral research fellow at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. In 2022, she was the recipient of a Rising Star in Engineering in Health Award from Johns Hopkins and Columbia Engineering. Rungratsameetaweemana’s interdisciplinary research interests lie at the intersection of systems neuroscience and artificial intelligence, where her lab integrates complementary computational and experimental approaches. These include deep learning models and machine learning techniques combined with psychophysical and electrophysiological data, such as human intracranial recordings and rodent electrophysiology. This semester, Nuttida is teaching BMEN E4110: Biostatistics for Engineers.
Behzad Vaziri
Behzad Vaziri joined the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering as an assistant professor in July 2024. Vaziri received a PhD in energy and mineral engineering from Penn State University in 2022, an MSc in metallurgical engineering from the University of Utah in 2018, and a BSc in mineral processing engineering from Istanbul Technical University in 2013. As part of the Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials (S3M) research program, his work is in the areas of extractive metallurgy, mineral processing, surface and colloid chemistry, and hydrometallurgy. He focuses on the sustainable extraction and separation of energy-critical minerals and metals from primary and secondary resources.
Zhengbo Zou
Zhengbo Zou joined the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics as an assistant professor in July 2024. Zou received his PhD from New York University (2021), his MSc from Carnegie Mellon University (2015), and his BEng from Tongji University (2014), all in civil engineering. Prior to Columbia, he was an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. Zou’s research aims to understand how intelligent agents, such as construction robots and building control systems, interact with human operators, occupants, the built environment, and the society. Zou leverages machine learning and control theory to design, build, and control these intelligent agents, and conducts human participant experiments to study their impacts on the end users. He will teach applied machine learning in civil engineering.