ECE welcomes seven new faculty for 2023/24

With research expertise in biomedical AI, data science and machine learning, semiconductor optoelectronics, control with applications to neuroscience, organic optoelectronic and photonic devices, sustainable energy systems, and computer networks –  these faculty are striving to improve how people live and work in the world.

Welcome Electrical and Computer Engineering’s newest faculty members who will join the department this coming academic year.

Jiasi Chen, Associate Professor

Research Interests: Computer networks, mobile computing, multimedia systems, and augmented/virtual reality.

Jiasi Chen was most recently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Riverside. Her recent interests are in systems support for the metaverse, its security, and mobile generative AI. She received her PhD from Princeton University and BS from Columbia University, both in electrical engineering. While at UC Riverside, she received an NSF CAREER award and a Meta Faculty Research award.

Chen will join Michigan this September, 2023.

Vladimir Dvorkin, Assistant Professor

Research Interests: Optimization, control and machine learning for sustainable energy systems; Data privacy and algorithmic fairness; Nexus of energy markets and optimization theory.

Vladimir Dvorkin obtained his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Denmark in 2021. He also worked at Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial and Systems Engineering as a visiting Ph.D. student, and later as a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems and Energy Initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions & Iberdrola Group postdoctoral fellowship and the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems Best Paper Award.

Dvorkin will join Michigan this coming January, 2024.

Chris Giebink, Professor

Research Interests: Optoelectronic and photonic devices based on organic semiconductors, solar energy conversion, solid-state lighting, semiconductor lasers, and nonlinear optics.

Chris Giebink comes to U-M after ten years in the Electrical Engineering department at Penn State University. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton University working on organic light emitting diodes and lasers, and holds undergraduate degrees in both Physics and Engineering Science from Trinity University. He holds 11 patents and is a senior member of the IEEE, OSA, SPIE, and National Academy of Inventors as well as a recipient of the DARPA YFA, AFOSR YIP, and NSF CAREER awards.

Giebink will join Michigan this September, 2023.

Jing Shuang (Lisa) Li, Assistant Professor

Research Interests: Distributed control theory with applications to neuroscience (particularly motor and sensorimotor control), biology, and large-scale engineering systems.

Lisa Li received her PhD in Control + Dynamical Systems from Caltech, and a BASc in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto. Her research is focused on control-theoretic analysis of biological systems, which yields novel scientific explanations as well as valuable design insights for engineering systems. She is particularly interested in how biology co-designs and implements controllers using organic components, which face unique challenges – but give substantial energy savings – compared to their electronic counterparts.

Li will join Michigan this September, 2023.

Di Liang, Professor

Research Interests: Semiconductor optoelectronics, compound semiconductor and silicon-based photonic devices, large-scale photonic integration for optical interconnect, sensing, and computing.

Di Liang had 14 years of experience in advanced semiconductor research and product development in HP Labs and Alibaba Cloud Computing prior to joining U-M. His work on heterogeneous photonic integration has helped generate several billions of dollars in revenue for leading semiconductor companies. He received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame, and BS degree in optical engineering from the Zhejiang University in China. He has been granted more than 50 patents. He is a Fellow of Optica (former OSA), and associate editor of Photonics Research and Journal of Quantum Electronics.

Liang will join Michigan January 2024.

Samet Oymak, Assistant Professor

Research Interests: Principled methods and theories for data science and machine learning to enable resource efficiency and trustworthy decision-making.

Samet Oymak was most recently an Assistant Professor of ECE at the University of California, Riverside, where he received a Google Research Scholar award and an NSF CAREER award. He received his PhD degree from Caltech in 2015, receiving a Wilts Prize for best EE thesis. After graduation, he was a postdoc at UC Berkeley as a Simons Fellow and also briefly worked at Google and in algorithmic finance. His recent research focuses on the foundations of transformers, language models, and their trustworthy deployment in AI systems.

Oymak will join Michigan this September, 2023.

Liyue Shen, Assistant Professor

Research Interests: Biomedical AI, medical image analysis, biomedical imaging, machine learning, computer vision, signal and image processing, AI for precision health, and bioinformatics.

Liyue Shen received her PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and her Bachelor’s degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University. Her research lies in the interdisciplinary area of Biomedical AI, and recently focuses on the generative diffusion models, implicit neural representation learning and multimodal foundation models. She was selected as a Rising Star in EECS by MIT and a Rising Star in Data Science by The University of Chicago. She is also chairing the Women in Machine Learning (WiML) workshop this year.

Shen will join Michigan this September, 2023.