UCLA Engineering: UCLA Engineer Magazine

Three Exceptional New Faculty Members Join UCLA Engineering

Civil and Environmental Engineering Department

Assistant Professor Scott Brandenberg
PhD - University of California, Davis, 2005

Professor Scott Brandenberg’s research interests include geotechnical earthquake engineering with a focus on soil-structure interaction, liquefaction, data acquisition and processing, and numerical analysis. While at UC Davis, he used large centrifuge models containing dense instrumentation arrays to identify physical mechanisms of soil-pile-interaction in liquefied and laterally spreading ground, and used those fundamental insights to improve guidelines for simple numerical design approaches. He plans to assess the ability of these simplified methods to predict pile foundation response from case histories that exhibited both good and bad performance during lateral spreads.

New areas of focus include the characterization of shear strength of peaty organic soils underlying many of the levees in California’s bay delta, and three-dimensional characterization of soil properties using shear wave velocity tomography for field and laboratory applications.

Computer Science Department

Professor Demetri Terzopoulos
PhD - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1984

Professor Demetri Terzopoulos conducts research in computer graphics, computer vision, medical image analysis, computer-aided design, and artificial intelligence/life. He is the inventor of deformable models, among them the famous active contours or “snakes” algorithm, which have been widely cited in these and related fields. He and his students also create remarkably realistic, biomimetic models of lower animals and humans that incorporate biomechanical virtual bodies and intelligent brains.

Prior to joining UCLA as the Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science, Terzopoulos held the Lucy and Henry Moses Professorship in Science and was a professor of computer science and mathematics at New York University. He is a Fellow of IEEE and a member of the European Academy of Sciences. Among his numerous awards, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has recognized his “pioneering work in physically-based computer-generated techniques used to simulate realistic cloth in motion pictures” with a 2005 Academy Award for Technical Achievement.

Materials Science and Engineering Department

Assistant Professor Yu Huang
PhD - Harvard University, 2003

Professor Yu Huang’s research interest centers broadly on the interface of functional nanosystems and biosystems. Specific areas include developing programmed synthesis of nanostructures with molecular precision and assembling them into increasingly complex architecture through genetic control of biological scaffolds; investigating fundamental properties of such materials and exploring them as functional nanosystems for applications in electronics and optoelectronics; and developing a new nanosystem-enabled technology platform that can be broadly applied to study biological process, including detection, imaging, and manipulation at the molecular level.

In 2003, she was selected by MIT’s Technology Review as one of the top 100 young innovators whose work will have a significant impact on the world.