Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty

Tenured and Tenure Track Faculty

USC Dornsife College
USC Viterbi School of Engineering

USC Dornsife College

Biological Sciences – Human and Evolutionary Biology

Jill McNitt-Gray

Professor of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering

Email: mcnitt@usc.edu

Dr. McNitt-Gray is the Director of the USC Biomechanics Research Laboratory and is a Fellow of the American Society of Biomechanics (ASB), International Society of Biomechanics (ISB), and the National Academy of Kinesiology. Dr. McNitt-Gray’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the neuromuscular control and dynamics of movement. She uses both experimental and dynamic modeling approaches to test research hypotheses specific to control priorities during well-practiced, goal-directed tasks.

Lindsey Schier

Gabilan Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences

Email: lschier@usc.edu

Lorraine Turcotte

Gabilan Distinguished Professorship in Science and Engineering and Professor of Biological Sciences

Email: turcotte@usc.edu

Biological Sciences – Marine and Environmental Biology

Naomi M. Levine

Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and Earth Sciences

Email: n.levine@usc.edu

Julia Schwartzman

Gabilan Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences

Email: julias21@usc.edu

Julia Schwartman received her Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison studying how marine bacteria persist as animal symbionts. She subsequently trained as a Ruth Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School where she investigated the evolutionary diversification of animal-associated bacteria, and as a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT where her work focused on the ecological consequences of phenotypic heterogeneity in marine bacteria. At USC, Schwartman's lab will investigate how complex bacterial behaviors shape coastal marine ecosystems through their contribution to nutrient cycling and the development of brown algae.

Noelle Held

Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences

Email:

Noelle Held will join the USC Department of Biology Sciences as Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences in January 2023. Held is a microbial biogeochemist and oceanographer. Through proteomics and quantitative microscopy, Held studies the inner workings of microbial cells, and how this scales up to ecological function and global scale processes. Held received her Ph.D. in Chemical Oceanography and Microbial Biogeochemistry from MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and was a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Sciences.

Laura Melissa Guzman

Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences

Email: guzmanur@usc.edu

Laura Melissa Guzman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Science at USC. Her research links ecology, data science, and conservation, with a particular focus on the environmental drivers behind changes in pollinator distributions in North America.

Carly Kenkel

Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences

Email: ckenkel@usc.edu

The Cnidarian Evolutionary Ecology Lab studies how organism-environment interactions induce or select for different phenotypes and how these ecological interactions influence and are influenced by the evolutionary trajectories of populations and species. We use a variety of methods to address these questions, ranging from field experiments to ecophysiology to genomic analyses. We also have a strong interest in “translational ecology” and prioritize questions with conservation and restoration applications.

Wiebke Ziebis

Associate Professor of Biological Sciences

Email: wziebis@usc.edu

Suzanne Edmands

Professor of Biological Sciences

Email: sedmands@usc.edu

Biological Sciences – Molecular and Computational Biology

Irene Chiolo

Associate Professor of Biological Sciences

Email: chiolo@usc.edu

Susan Forsburg

Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences

Email: forsburg@usc.edu

Susan Forsburg did her AB at UC Berkeley, her PhD at MIT, and her postdoc at ICRF/Oxford. She started her lab at the Salk Institute in 1993, and moved to USC in 2004. Her research uses a yeast model system to investigate genome instability following DNA replication stress.

Carolyn Phillips

Associate Professor of Biological Sciences

Email: cphil@usc.edu

Biological Sciences – Neurobiology

Lauren McElvain

Gabilan Assistant Professor of Neurobiology

Email: mcelvain@usc.edu

Lauren McElvain received a Sc.B. in Neuroscience from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Neurosciences from the University of California, San Diego and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. McElvain completed postdoctoral training as an international collaboration between the Department of Physics at the University of California, San Diego and the Neurosciences Programme at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal. Her research group investigates the neural circuits that control movement using multidisciplinary cellular and systems neuroscience approaches, including molecular biology, electrophysiology, behavior, and computational modeling. Her current research focuses on the organization and function of the basal ganglia and the circuit basis of common movement disorders, including Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases.

Sarah Bottjer

Professor of Biological Sciences and Psychology

Email: bottjer@usc.edu

Emily Liman

Professor of Biological Sciences

Email: liman@usc.edu

Judith Hirsch

Gabilan Distinguished Professorship in Science and Engineering and Professor of Biological Sciences

Email: jhirsch@usc.edu

Quantitative and Computational Biology

Jazlyn Mooney

Gabilan Assistant Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology

Email: jazlynmo@usc.edu

Liang Chen

Professor of Biological Sciences

Email: liang.chen@usc.edu

Chemistry

Kate White

Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Email: katewhit@usc.edu

Our research aims to help bridge the gap between structural biology and physiology by pioneering new experimental and computational tools for multi-scale structural biology (atomic to cellular scales). A major focus is the multi-scale structure and function of pancreatic β-cells and the chemical environment of insulin vesicles. Our approach to cell mapping utilizes a combination of multi-modal imaging, biophysical approaches, and integrative modeling metamodeling to relate multi-scale structure to cell function.

Hanna Reisler

University Professor, Lloyd Armstrong, Jr. Chair in Science and Engineering and Professor of Chemistry

Email: reisler@usc.edu

Megan Fieser

Gabilan Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Email: fieser@usc.edu

Anna Krylov

Gabilan Distinguished Professor in Science and Engineering and Professor of Chemistry

Email: krylov@usc.edu

Smaranda Marinescu

Gabilan Associate Professor of Chemistry

Email: smarines@usc.edu

Earth Sciences

Caroline Seyler

Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences

Email: seyler@usc.edu

Caroline Seyler will join the Department of Earth Sciences at USC in January 2024. Seyler received her Ph.D. in Earth Sciences from McGill University in 2021 and has since been a postdoc at the University of Texas and an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota. She is interested in the deformation of rocks at tectonic plate boundaries from earthquakes to ductile flow. Seyler's work focuses on the rheology of faults and shear zones using a combination of field, experimental and microanalytical methods to determine how deformation mechanisms operating at the atomic scale control plate tectonics and influence seismic hazard.

Heidi Houston

Professor of Earth Sciences

Email: heidi.houston@gmail.com

Karen Lloyd

Professor of Earth Sciences

Email:

Emily Cooperdock

Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences

Email: cooperdo@usc.edu

Sarah Feakins

Professor of Earth Sciences

Email: feakins@usc.edu

Professor Sarah Feakins studies past climate using techniques of organic geochemistry, extracting molecular fossils from soils, lakes, and ocean sediments. The molecular fossils provide clues to past vegetation and climate. Research projects are currently underway in the western US, South America, and Africa, including warm times of the past with lessons for environments of human origins and our future climate.

Mathematics

Susan Montgomery

Gabilan Distinguished Professorship in Science and Engineering and Professor of Mathematics

Email: smontgom@math.usc.edu

Sami Assaf

Professor of Mathematics

Email: shassaf@usc.edu

Susan Friedlander

Professor of Mathematics

Email: susanfri@usc.edu

Juhi Jang

Professor of Mathematics

Email: juhijang@usc.edu

Greta Panova

Professor of Mathematics

Email: gpanova@usc.edu

Physics and Astronomy

Kelly Luo

Gabilan Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Email: yunqiuke@usc.edu

Kelly Luo's research focuses on spin-based information processing in van der Waals quantum materials, utilizing experimental techniques such as ultrafast optical microscopy and microwave low-temperature magnetotransport, among others. Luo was previously a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow and Honorary Kavli Fellow at Cornell University studying spin torque dynamics in van der Waals magnets. Luo received her Ph.D. in physics at the Ohio State University studying information transduction between spintronic, photonic, and magnetic states in two-dimensional hybrid systems. She obtained her undergraduate degree in physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Vera Gluscevic

Gabilan Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Email: gluscevi@usc.edu

Rosa Di Felice

Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Email: difelice@usc.edu

Elena Pierpaoli

Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Email: pierpaol@usc.edu

I am a cosmologist interested in understanding the composition and evolution of the Universe. My work focuses on the interpretation of survey data in various wavelengths in order to understand the properties of dark matter and dark energy, as well as the early Universe physical processes that set the seeds for what we observe around us. I primarily work on the cosmic microwave background - the relic radiation produced after the Big Bang - and galaxy clusters - the largest gravitationally bound objects in our Universe.

Grace Lu

Professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering

Email: jialu@usc.edu

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

Neda Maghsoodi

Gabilan Assistant Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

Email: maghsoodi@usc.edu

Neda Maghsoodi is a Gabilan Assistant Professor in the USC Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. Maghsoodi was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. Prior to this, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Maghsoodi received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Maghsoodi's research lies at the interface of applied mechanics, materials science, and biology and develops novel theoretical-computational models to elucidate complex behavior of soft structures in engineering and biology. In her academic career, Maghsoodi has received several honors and awards; including, she was named a Rising Star in Mechanical Engineering by UC-Berkeley and received the Best Paper award in the ASME International Conference on Micro- and Nanosystems.

Alejandra Uranga

WISE Gabilan Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

Email: auranga@usc.edu

Alejandra Uranga is an Assistant Professor at the USC Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. Before joining USC in 2016, she was a Postdoctoral Associate (1 year) and then a Research Engineer (4 years) in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at MIT. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Florida Tech, a Master of Applied Sciences in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Victoria, BC, Canada, and a PhD degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT. Dr. Uranga's research interests are in aerodynamics, novel aircraft design, and integrated propulsion systems, for which she favors a combined computational and experimental approach. Her work aims to help achieve environmentally sustainable aviation.

Eva Kanso

Zohrab A. Kaprielian Fellow in Engineering and Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

Email: kanso@usc.edu

Eva Kanso is a professor and the Z.H. Kaprielian Fellow in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Southern California. While at USC, Kanso joined the Division of Civil, Mechanical & Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) as an IPA rotator in Fall 2021. Prior to joining USC in 2005, Kanso held a two-year postdoctoral position in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech. She received a Ph.D. degree in 2003 and an M.S. degree in 1999 in Mechanical Engineering, as well as an M.A. degree in 2002 in Mathematics, all from the University of California at Berkeley. She obtained her Bachelor of Engineering degree from the American University of Beirut with distinction. Kanso held visiting positions at Princeton University in 2004, the Laboratoire LadHyX at the Ecole Polytechnique in 2015, the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 2016-2017, the Simons Foundation in 2016-2017, and the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in 2021. Her research interests concern fundamental problems in the biophysics of cellular and subcellular processes and the physics of animal behavior, both at the individual and collection levels. A central theme in her work is the role of the mechanical environment, specifically the fluid medium and fluid-structure interactions, in shaping and driving biological functions.

Biomedical Engineering

Eun Ji Chung

Gabilan Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Email: eunchung@usc.edu

Eun Ji Chung is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California. She received her B.A. in Molecular Biology with honors from Scripps College (Claremont, CA) and her Ph.D. from the Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences Program and the Department of Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University. At Northwestern, Dr. Chung developed biodegradable, citric acid-based polymers and nanocomposites for tissue engineering. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, she developed bio-nanomaterials for theranostic applications. Professor Chung is a recipient of the NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award (2014) and the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (DP2, 2018), and received the USC faculty mentoring award for undergraduates in 2018, among many other awards. Dr. Chung is a member of the Society for Biomaterials, Biomedical Engineering Society, and the American Institute for Chemical Engineers.

Maral Mousavi

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Email: mousavi.maral@usc.edu

Maral Mousavi joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering at USC in 2019 as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Mousavi’s research experiences and interests span from point-of-care diagnostics, to electrochemical sensors, wearable devices, neural probes, and tools for precision medicine. She received her B.S. from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. She completed her PhD studies in 2016 at the University of Minnesota, under the advisement of Professor Philippe Buhlmann, who is one of the world leaders in supramolecular electrochemical ion sensing. In her doctorate studies, she worked on electrochemical devices for sensing and energy storage, and use of fluorous compounds as novel materials for improving selectivity of potentiometric sensors. From 2016-2019, Maral was a postdoctoral fellow in the research group of Professor George Whitesides at Harvard University, and Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, working on affordable diagnostic devices to make healthcare and analysis accessible to all. Professor Mousavi is the recipient of NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, 3M Nontenured Faculty Award, Powell Research Award, Zumberge Diversity and Inclusion Research Award, the Grand Prize for the Maseeh Entrepreneurship Research Competition, the University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, Graham N. Gleysteen Fellowship for Academic Excellence, and two Graduate Student Research Awards from Eastern Analytical Symposium, and Society for Electroanalytical Chemistry.

Ellis Meng

Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering

Email: ellis.meng@usc.edu

Ellis Meng directs the Biomedical Microsystems Laboratory which focuses on developing novel micro- and nanotechnologies for biomedical applications. In particular, we are interested in the integration of multiple modalities (e.g. electrical, mechanical, and chemical) in miniaturized devices measuring no more than a few millimeters for use in fundamental scientific research, biomedical diagnostics, monitoring, and therapy.

Jennifer Treweek

WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Email: jtreweek@usc.edu

Cristina Zavaleta

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Email: czavalet@usc.edu

Dr. Zavaleta was born and raised in a small border town in South Texas, near Mexico. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Nuclear Medicine at the University of Incarnate Word, a small private university in San Antonio. After graduating, she started in the Medical Physics graduate program at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio where she focused on utilizing radioactive nanoparticles for the treatment of ovarian cancer. After receiving her Ph.D., she began a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University under the guidance of Dr. Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, where she helped pioneer a new molecular imaging strategy that utilizes Raman nanoparticles for cancer detection. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California in the department of Biomedical Engineering. Her lab focuses on providing physicians with new nano-based molecular imaging tools to improve cancer detection and treatment.

Stacey Finley

Gordon S. Marshall Early Career Chair and Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Biological Sciences

Email: sfinley@usc.edu

Stacey Finley is the holder of the Nichole A. and Thuan Q. Pham Professorship and Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, as well as Quantitative and Computational Biology, at the University of Southern California. Dr. Finley received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Florida A & M University and obtained her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University. She completed postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Finley joined the faculty at USC in 2013, and she leads the Computational Systems Biology Laboratory. Dr. Finley has a joint appointment in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, and she is a member of the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Finley is also a standing member of the MABS Study Section at NIH. Her research has been supported by grants from the NSF, NIH, and American Cancer Society.

Selected honors. 2016 NSF Faculty Early CAREER Award; 2016 Young Innovator by the Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering journal; Leah Edelstein-Keshet Prize from the Society of Mathematical Biology; Junior Research Award from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering; the Hanna Reisler Mentorship Award; 2018 AACR NextGen Star; 2018 Orange County Engineering Council Outstanding Young Engineer; 2021 Elected Fellow of American Institute for Biological and Medical Engineering; 2022 Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society

Megan McCain

Chonette Early Career Chair and Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine

Email: mlmccain@usc.edu

Megan L. McCain earned her BS in Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis and her PhD in Engineering Sciences at Harvard University. As a graduate student, she engineered cardiac cells and tissues to investigate the role of mechanotransduction in cardiac development and disease. Megan continued as a post-doctoral researcher at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, where she engineered microscale, functional mimics of human cardiac tissues, known as “Heart on a Chip”. In 2014, Megan joined USC as the Gabilan Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering. She also currently holds a joint appointment in the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. Her research group, the Laboratory for Living Systems Engineering, engineers and utilizes novel “Organ on Chip” platforms for human disease modeling and drug screening, with a focus on cardiac and skeletal muscle. Megan is a recipient of a Scientist Development Grant from the American Heart Association, and has been recognized as a Top Innovator Under 35 by MIT Technology Review and a Rising Star by the Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering sub-group of the Biomedical Engineering Society.

Jill McNitt-Gray

Professor of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering

Email: mcnitt@usc.edu

Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

Katherine Shing

Associate Professor Emeritus

Email:

Shaama Sharada

Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Chemistry

Email: ssharada@usc.edu

Prof. Shaama Mallikarjun Sharada is an Associate Professor in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Southern California. Her research interests span the development and application of quantum chemistry methods to design catalysts for sustainable chemistry. Her group is developing efficient algorithms, inspired from signal processing, for advancing sophisticated rate theories in catalysis. The group is also establishing frameworks for catalyst design and discovery towards efficient natural gas conversion and light-driven carbon dioxide utilization.

Andrea Armani

Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

Email: armani@usc.edu

Andrea Hodge

Arthur B. Freeman Professor and Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

Email: ahodge@usc.edu

Malancha Gupta

Jack Munushian Early Career Chair and Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Chemistry

Email: malanchg@usc.edu

Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Kandis Leslie Abdul-Aziz

Gabilan Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Email:

Kandis Leslie Gilliard-AbdulAziz will join the USC Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as a Gabilan Assistant Professor in January 2024. She currently leads the Sustainable Catalysis and Materials laboratory (the-sustainable-lab.com) at the University of California, Riverside in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering. Abdul-Aziz received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining UC Riverside, she was a Provost postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also worked previously as a Forensic scientist for the Philadelphia police department and as a Refinery chemist at Sunoco Chemicals in Philadelphia after receiving a B.S. in Chemistry from Temple University. Her research group develops sustainable catalytic processes using an interdisciplinary toolset from chemistry, materials and chemical engineering. Abdul-Aziz is a 2021 Scialog Negative Emissions Science and National Academy Frontiers of Engineering fellow. She was recently awarded a 2022 NSF Career Award for developing specialized catalysts for CO₂ capture and utilization.

Jiachen Zhang

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Email: jiachen.zhang@usc.edu

Dr. Jiachen Zhang will be joining the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the USC as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Spring 2024. Her research group investigates the interactions of air quality, climate, and society, quantifying the impacts of strategies aimed at mitigating climate change and air pollution. Dr. Zhang holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from USC and a B.S. in Atmospheric Sciences from Peking University. Currently, Dr. Zhang is the manager of the Mobile Source Technology Assessment and Modeling Section at the California Air Resources Board, where she leads a team of scientists and engineers to conduct original research projects, develop emissions inventory, and inform first-of-their-kind policies aimed at promoting electric vehicles and reducing air pollution emissions.

Ruolin Li

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Email:

Burcin Becerik-Gerber

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Email: becerik@usc.edu

Audrey Olivier

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Email: audreyol@usc.edu

Amy Childress

Gabilan Distinguished Professorship in Science and Engineering and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Email: amyec@usc.edu

Kelly Sanders

Dr. Teh Fu Yen Early Career Chair and Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Spatial Sciences

Email: ktsanders@usc.edu

Computer Science

Jieyu Zhao

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Email: jieyuz@usc.edu

Jieyu Zhao is a postdoctoral research at UMD, working together with Professor Hal Daumé III. Zhao will join the Department of Computer Science at USC in August 2023. Zhao obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at UCLA where she was advised by Professor Kai-Wei Chang. Her research interest lies in fairness of ML/NLP models. Her paper got the EMNLP Best Long Paper Award (2017). Zhao was one of the recipients of 2020 Microsoft Ph.D. Fellowship and has been selected to participate in the 2021 Rising Stars in EECS workshop. Her research has been covered by news media such as Wires, The Daily Mail and so on. Zhao was invited by UN-WOMEN Beijing on a panel discussion about gender equality and social responsibility. More detail can be found at jyzhao.net.

Souti Chattopadhyay

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Email: schattop@usc.edu

Souti “Rini” Chattopadhyay received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Oregon State University. She works at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Software Engineering, and Cognitive Science. Her work is focused on understanding how humans make decisions when interacting with interfaces, specifically programming interfaces. She is an intern alum of Microsoft Research and continues working with them to broaden the participation of future generations in computing. Some of her works were awarded best papers and honorable mentions by ACM and IEEE, including understanding cognitive biases in programmers, and exploring a plethora of challenges data scientists face. Chattopadhyay's work on cognitive biases was also recognized as research highlights by CACM and that on supporting data scientists was featured in Nature articles.

Weihang Wang

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Email: weihangw@usc.edu

Weihang Wang's research interests are in software engineering. Before joining USC, Wang was an Assistant Professor at University at Buffalo, from 2018 to 2022. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2018. Wang was awarded an NSF CAREER Award, a University at Buffalo Exceptional Scholar - Young Investigator Award, a Maurice H. Halstead Memorial Research Award, a Facebook Testing and Verification Research Award, and a Mozilla Research Award.

Ruishan Liu

Assistant Professor Computer Science

Email: ruishanl@usc.edu

Paraskevi Micha

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Email:

Swabha Swayamdipta

Gabilan Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Email: swabhas@usc.edu

Swabha Swayamdipta is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and a Gabilan Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. Her research interests are in natural language processing and machine learning, with a primary interest in the estimation of dataset quality, the semi-automatic collection of impactful data, and evaluating how human biases affect dataset construction and model decisions. At USC, Swabha has launched the Data, Interpretability, Language and Learning (DILL) Lab. Her work has received outstanding paper awards at ICML 2022, NeurIPS 2021 and an honorable mention for the best paper at ACL 2020, and is supported by awards from the Allen Institute for AI and Intel Labs.

Bistra Dilkina

Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Early Career Chair and Associate Professor of Computer Science and Industrial & Systems Engineering

Email: dilkina@usc.edu

Dr. Bistra Dilkina is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, co-director of the USC Center of AI in Society, and the inaugural Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Early Career Chair at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Her research and teaching center around the integration of machine learning and discrete optimization, with a strong focus on AI applications in computational sustainability and social good. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2012 and was a post-doctoral associate at the Institute for Computational Sustainability. Her research has contributed significant advances to machine-learning-guided combinatorial solving including mathematical programming and planning, as well as decision-focused learning where combinatorial reasoning is integrated in machine learning pipelines. Her applied research in Computational Sustainability spans using AI for wildlife conservation planning, using AI to understand the impacts of climate change in terms of energy, water, habitat and human migration, and using AI to optimize fortification of lifeline infrastructures for disaster resilience. She has over 90 publications and has co-organized or served as a chair to numerous workshops, tutorials, and special tracks at major conferences.

Heather Culbertson

WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Email: hculbert@usc.edu

Heather Culbertson’s research focuses on the design and control of haptic devices and rendering systems, human-robot interaction, and virtual reality. Previously, she was a research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University where she worked in the Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine (CHARM) Lab. She received her PhD in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 working in the Haptics Group, part of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. Her awards include the NSF CAREER Award, IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics Early Career Award, citation for meritorious service as a reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Haptics, Best Paper at UIST 2017, and the Best Hands-On Demonstration Award at IEEE World Haptics 2013.

Yan Liu

Philip and Cayley MacDonald Endowed Early Career Chair and Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering

Email: liu32@usc.edu

Maja Mataric

Chan Soon-Shiong Chair and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics

Email: mataric@usc.edu

Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering

Leana Golubchik

Stephen and Etta Varra Professor and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science

Email: leana@usc.edu

Paria Rashidinejad

Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Email:

Feifei Qian

Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering; WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor

Email: feifeiqi@usc.edu

Mengjie Yu

Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering

Email: mengjiey@usc.edu

Michelle Povinelli

Dean's Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics and Astronomy

Email: povinell@usc.edu

Povinelli's research expertise is in optics and photonics. She is a Fellow of Optica and SPIE and a recipient of the NSF CAREER, ARO Young Investigator, and PECASE awards. She received her PhD in Physics from MIT, and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge.