Seven Exceptional Scholars Join Engineering School's Faculty

Date: August 11, 2004
Contact: Chris Sutton ( chris@ea.ucla.edu )
Phone: 310-206-0540

Industry veterans, accomplished researchers, even a former officer in the Italian Navy - the School's newest faculty recruits are a diverse and impressive group of scholars and teachers. They represent a diverse range of expertise, and are an important addition to the School's already impressive roster.

Timothy Deming - Professor
PhD - Berkeley, 1993
Bioengineering

Timothy Deming's research interests include polymer and materials synthesis, with an emphasis on the application of chemical principles, as well as the use of biological precedents and strategies for the design of new materials. He is also focused on new, practical chemical routes for the synthesis of biological and biomimetic materials, which are of interest as they can be prepared from renewable resources, are biocompatible and biodegradable, and often possess excellent physical properties.

Prior to joining UCLA, Deming held joint appointments in the Materials and Chemistry Departments at UC Santa Barbara. He received the Materials Research Society Young Investigator Award in 2003.

Emilio Frazzoli - Assistant Professor
PhD - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Emilio Frazzoli's current research interests include algorithmic, computational and geometric approaches to the design and development of decision and control architectures for complex networked and autonomous systems in aerospace and other domains. Application areas include distributed cooperative control of multiple vehicle systems over wireless networks, guidance and control of agile vehicles, high-confidence software engineering for high-performance dynamical systems and verification of hybrid systems.

Prior to joining UCLA, Frazzoli was a member of the Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering Department of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before pursuing his doctorate, Frazzoli served as an officer in the Italian Navy, and was a flight dynamics specialist in the spacecraft control center of Telespazio (Rome, Italy).

Eric M.V. Hoek - Assistant Professor
PhD - Yale University, 2002
Civil and Environmental Engineering

Eric Hoek's fundamental research interest is in physicochemical and colloidal processes in aqueous environmental systems. His research group is currently focused on developing novel membrane materials and processes to minimize surface fouling phenomena and improve treated water quality in desalination and water reuse applications. He is a Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science Fellow.

Previously, Hoek was an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering in the Bourns College of Engineering at UC Riverside. He also worked as an engineer for Merck and Co., Inc. and for Contech Construction Products Inc., and has been a consultant for DCI Environmental Services since 1996.

Sudhakar Pamarti - Assistant Professor
PhD - University of California, San Diego, 2003
Electrical Engineering

Sudhakar Pamarti is interested in highly integrated implementations of wireless and wireline communication systems. He focuses on developing, applying, and analyzing techniques from digital signal processing and communication theory to enhance the performance and lower the cost and power consumption of these systems.

Pamarti was a senior member of the Memory Interface Division technical staff at Rambus Inc. before joining UCLA. While there, he designed circuits and systems for multi-Gb/s chip-to-chip I/O interfaces, and developed enabling techniques for future I/O demands.

Qibing Pei - Professor
PhD - Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1990
Materials Science and Engineering

Qibing Pei's research interests include synthesis of new electronic polymers, nanostructured solar cells, and electroelastomers with large electrically-induced strain. He applies molecular design and nanoscale engineering to the discovery of new polymers with novel electronic or mechanical property.

Before joining UCLA, Pei was a senior research engineer at SRI. Earlier in his career, he was senior chemist at UNIAX Corporation, which later became DuPont Display. He has worked on a variety of electronic polymers and devices including polymer light emitting diodes, polymer light emitting electrochemical cells, electroactive polymer artificial muscles and biologically-inspired robots.

Amit Sahai - Associate Professor
PhD - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000
Computer Science

Amit Sahai's primary research focus is the foundations of cryptography. He is also interested in other areas of theoretical computer science, including the fundamental problems related to security, complexity theory, algorithms, learning theory and the theory of error-correcting codes.

Prior to joining UCLA, Sahai was an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University. He received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship in computer science in 2002.

Tatiana Segura - Assistant Professor
PhD - Northwestern University, 2004
Chemical Engineering

Tatiana Segura will join UCLA's chemical engineering faculty in 2006. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in Switzerland.

Segura's research focus is in the area of novel gene delivery strategies for tissue engineering applications. One area of interest involves the immobilization of DNA complexes to cell-binding surfaces to enhance gene transfer by reducing mass transfer limitations while providing greater spatial control over where gene delivery occurs.