Leadership

Murali Annavaram has been a faculty member in the Ming-Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California from 2007. He currently holds the Robert G. and Mary G. Lane Early Career Chair. His research focuses on energy efficiency and reliability of computing platforms. On the mobile platform end, his research focuses on energy efficient sensor management for body area sensor networks for continuous and real-time health monitoring. He also has an active research group focused on computer systems architecture exploring reliability challenges in the future CMOS technologies. Murali received NSF CAREER award in 2010 and an IBM Faculty Partnership award in 2009. He is also passionate about his teaching. He received the Stevens Institute's Innovation Inside curriculum award for jointly developing a mobile systems design course.

Prior to his appointment at USC, he was a senior research scientist at the Intel Microprocessor Research Labs from 2001 to 2007 working on energy efficient server design and 3D stacking architectures. In 2007 he was a visiting researcher at the Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto working on virtual trip line based traffic sensing. His work on Energy Per Instruction Throttling at Intel is implemented in Intel Core i7 processor to turbo boost performance at a fixed power budget. His work on Virtual-Trip-Lines at Nokia formed the foundation for Nokia Traffic Works product that provides real time traffic sensing using mobile phones. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2001. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM.

Hanna Reisler has been Professor of Chemistry at USC since 1987. Her research interests are in the area of chemical reaction dynamics. Specifically, she studies the photophysics, photochemistry and reaction mechanisms of molecules important in the atmosphere, combustion, and biology using sophisticated laser and imaging techniques often in collaboration with theory. Her recent work has focused also on the understanding bond breaking processes in networks of water and ice and the photochemical production of transient species relevant to atmospheric processes. She was appointed as University Professor at USC and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021. In 2002 she was appointed the inaugural holder of the Lloyd Armstrong Jr. Endowed Chair in Science and Engineering in recognition of her leadership role in advancing the careers of women in science and engineering.

Dr. Shang-Hua Teng has twice won the prestigious Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science, first in 2008, for developing the theory of smoothed analysis , and then in 2015, for designing the groundbreaking nearly-linear time Laplacian solver for network systems. Both are joint work with Dan Spielman of Yale --- his long-time collaborator. Smoothed analysis is fundamental for modeling and analyzing practical algorithms, and the Laplacian paradigm has since led to several breakthroughs in network analysis, matrix computation, and optimization.

Citing him as, "one of the most original theoretical computer scientists in the world", the Simons Foundation named Teng a 2014 Simons Investigator, for pursuing long-term curiosity-driven fundamental research. He and his collaborators also received the best paper award at ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) for what's considered to be the ``first improvement in 10 years'' of a fundamental optimization problem --- the computation of maximum flows and minimum cuts in a network. In addition, he is known for his joint work with Xi Chen and Xiaotie Deng that characterized the complexity for computing an approximate Nash equilibrium in game theory, and his joint papers on market equilibria in computational economics

I am an Associate Professor of Teaching at the Department of Biological Sciences, Molecular and Computational Biology section, with a courtesy appointment at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at USC Keck Medical School. Born in Rome, Italy, I received my PhD in Clinical and Experimental Allergology and Immunology from the University of Siena in 2005. Before joining the University of Southern California in 2014 as teaching professor, I conducted research in the field of immunology at the University of Arizona, Tucson and different national (INSERM) and international (WHO- IARC) institutes in Lyon, France. At USC over every academic year, I teach courses and educational laboratories on areas such as immunology, cancer, health promotion and aging biology. I actively collaborate with the Davis School of Gerontology as co-instructor of undergraduate and master courses and with the undergraduate students Biology Club as Faculty advisor. I am an active member of the USC Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) Program. For WiSE I am in charge as Faculty Coordinator of the Undergraduate Students Research Program, and I am also member of the Advisory Board.

The Edmands Lab is broadly interested in conservation, population and evolutionary genetics. Much of our work uses the crustacean Tigriopus californicus (“the Drosophila of the Sea”) as a model for understanding the genetic basis of fundamental biological processes including reproductive isolation, environmental stress tolerance and aging. Our lab also studies temporal and spatial genetic variation in organisms of concern for conservation and management, including current work on genetics and evolution of the island fox.