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Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing

The University of South Carolina College of Engineering and Computing welcomes 11 new faculty members

We welcome the following new faculty members to their roles at the College of Engineering and Computing.

Iftikhar Ahmad portrait

Iftikhar Ahmad

Assistant Professor
Electrical Engineering

Previous position: Senior Scientist, Sensor Electronic Technology, Inc.

Ph.D. – Texas Tech University

Research interests: growth and study of ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors including high aluminum content AlGaN, boron nitride and gallium oxide, fabrication of novel high-power electronic and photonic devices, and computer simulation of these devices

Chang Liu

Chang Liu

Assistant Professor
Chemical Engineering

Previous position: Associate Research Scientist, The Biodesign Institute, School of Biological and Health systems Engineering, Arizona State University 

Ph.D. – Florida International University

Research interests: Nanopore based point-of-care biosensors for personalized medicine, Biomarkers and biosensing platforms for clinical diagnosis and therapeutic strategies development, nanotechnology based tools for fundamental biomedical studies, and nanomaterials based implantable bioelectronics

Austin Downey

Austin Downey

Assistant Professor
Mechanical Engineering

Previous position: Graduate Research Assistant, Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, Iowa State University

Ph.D. – Iowa State University

Research interests: investigation of algorithms enabling condition assessment, characterization of sensors, and design and development of structural control systems

Erfan Goharian

Erfan Goharian

Assistant Professor
Civil and Environmental Engineering

Previous position: Postdoctoral Researcher, University of California Water Security and Sustainability Research Initiative (UC Water), Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, University of California, Davis

Ph.D. – University of Utah

Research interests: water resources systems analysis and integrated management of water resources. He develops complex quantitative and computational models with the purpose of providing enhanced knowledge needed to better understand interactions in coupled human-natural systems and water-energy-food nexus, and how they are shaped by climate, environmental, economic, social and political changes

Ming Hu

Ming Hu

Associate Professor
Mechanical Engineering

Previous position: Assistant Professor, Georesources and Materials Engineering, RWTH Aachen University

Ph.D. – Chinese Academy of Sciences

Research interests: modeling and simulation of micro-/nano-scale thermal transport in novel energy systems, in particular low-dimensional materials and nanostructures, and energy nanotechnology, interfacial heat transfer for advanced thermal management, and multi-scale and multiphysics modeling of complex energy transport process

Pooyan Jamshidi

Pooyan Jamshidi

Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering

Previous position: Postdoctoral Associate – School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Ph.D. – Dublin City University

Research interests: understanding performance behavior of highly-configurable systems (including deep neural networks, big data analytics, robotics systems) as well as solving computer system challenges (e.g., performance regressions, memory leak, energy consumption, parallelization) for distributed machine learning systems

Sanjib Sur

Sanjib Sur

Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering

Previous position: Ph.D. Candidate,  Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin – Madison

Ph.D. – University of Wisconsin – Madison

Research interests: wireless systems and architectures, millimeter-wave communications and networks, internet of things connectivity and sensing systems

Dezhi Wu

Dezhi Wu

Associate Professor
Integrated Information Technology Department

Previous position: Associate Professor, Computer Science & Information Systems Department, Southern Utah University

Ph.D. – New Jersey Institute of Technology

Research interests: human-computer interaction, behavioral information security, healthcare IT, e-Commerce, and mobile training

Songhua Xu

Songhua Xu

Associate Professor (tenured)
Integrated Information Technology Department

Previous position:  Former Assistant Professor, Department of Informatics, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Ph.D. – Yale University

Research interests: health information technology, including medical, health and cancer informatics; artificial intelligence, including personalization, information retrieval, knowledge management, recommender systems and text and image mining; patent informatics and intelligent software for practitioners in intellectual property law; computer graphics and interactive techniques for multimedia; visualization and visual analytics; intelligent user interfaces

Lang Yuan

Lang Yuan

Associate Professor
Mechanical Engineering

Previous position: Lead Research Engineer, Additive Core Discipline, GE Global Research

Ph.D. – Imperial College London

Research interests: integrated computational materials engineering, discrete element modeling, process development and optimization for additive, nucleation, X-Ray imaging and diffraction of solidification phenomena and data sciences

Qiang Zeng

Qiang Zeng

Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering

Previous position: Assistant Professor, Computer and Information Science Department, Temple University

Ph.D. – Penn State University

Research interests: Research interests: Nanopore based point-of-care biosensors for personalized medicine, Biomarkers and biosensing platforms for clinical diagnosis and therapeutic strategies development, nanotechnology based tools for fundamental biomedical studies, and nanomaterials based implantable bioelectronics


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