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College of Engineering Welcomes Eight Talented New Faculty Members for the Fall of 2024

August 21, 2024 Faculty

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Eight new faculty 2024
From left, top: Nelson da Luz, Egemen Okte, Mengfan Xu, Jacob Dyer Spiegel. From left, bottom: Xiaojun Wei, Sunandita Sarker, Chang Liu, Yuanrui Sang

This Fall, eight talented faculty members have joined the College of Engineering. We expect additional faculty to join the college in Spring 2025.

Biomedical Engineering

Associate Professor Chang Liu

Liu arrives at UMass Amherst from the University of South Carolina, where he was an Associate Professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering. Liu explains that “The overarching goal of my translational research efforts is to solve the paradox between quantitative biosensing and real-world expectations by developing new technologies. In the past five years, my research group has established a successful trajectory in this field.” He earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Florida International University in Miami and his BS in Biomedical Engineering from Beijing JiaoTong University in China. He also received a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2021 and a Maximizing Investigators' Research Award from the National Institutes of Health in 2024. 

Research Assistant Professor Xiaojun Wei

Like Liu, Wei comes to UMass Amherst from the University of South Carolina, where he served in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering as an Associate Scientist and, before that, a Postdoctoral Fellow/Research Associate. Earlier, he had worked as a Research Assistant at the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, where he also earned his PhD in Physical Chemistry. He has an MS in Material Engineering from Qingdao University of Science and Technology in China. Wei studies the development of nanopore-based biosensors and strategies for biomedical applications, the design and synthesis of functional nanoparticles for biomedical applications, and the investigation of nanoparticle- and nanopore-related surface chemistry and intermolecular interactions.

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research Assistant Professor Nelson da Luz 

Since 2022, da Luz has been serving as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the UMass CEE department. He specializes in data-driven approaches to managing water- and sanitation-infrastructure systems. He provides data-enabled solutions for water- and sanitation-related projects involved in environmental and public health as supported by various funding sources, including the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, California State Water Resources Control Board, and the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators. He earned his PhD in Civil Engineering from UMass Amherst in 2022 after getting his ME in Environmental Engineering and BS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Manhattan College.

Assistant Professor Egemen Okte

Okte has been promoted to Assistant Professor after serving since 2022 as a Research Assistant Professor and Lecturer in the UMass CEE department, where he won the CEE Faculty Teaching Award in 2024. He earned his PhD and M.Sc. in Civil Engineering from the Transportation Division of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as his BS in Civil Engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Turkey. He says that “My research focuses on assessing the sustainability of transportation infrastructure and improving sustainability through statistical methods and machine learning.” He has worked on projects funded by such agencies as the Federal Highway Administration, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, and others.

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Assistant Professor Yuanrui Sang 

Sang joins the ECE department from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she had been an Assistant Professor since 2019. Her research focuses on power-system operations and planning, including the analysis of power-system economics, reliability, resilience, and environmental impact. Her other research interests include flexible-power-transmission systems, the integration of renewable energy and electric vehicles in the power grid, and the application of high-performance computing in power-system research. She received her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Utah, her MS in Electrical Engineering from Western Carolina University in North Carolina, and her BS in Electrical Engineering from Southwest Jiaotong University in China.

Mechanical and Industrial Engineering

Assistant Professor Sunandita Sarker 

Sarker comes to UMass Amherst from the University of Maryland, where she was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Maryland Robotic Center. Among other research at the University of Maryland, she introduced novel, hybrid, additive-manufacturing strategies for micro- and nano-device fabrication; developed first-ever, 3D-printed, hollow-microinjection arrays for direct-cell microinjections; and innovated microneedle, array-based, injection platforms for neurodegenerative stem-cell treatments. She earned her PhD in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her BS in Mechanical Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

Assistant Professor Mengfan Xu

Xu arrives in the MIE Department from Northwestern University, where she earned her PhD in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences. She received her BS in Statistics from the University of Science and Technology of China and also conducted summer research in biostatistics at Yale University. Her research interests include “multi-armed bandits” (referring to a fundamental framework for algorithms that make decisions over time under uncertainty), online sequential decision-making under uncertainty, statistical learning, and causal inference. As she says, “My research goal is to formulate online, sequential, decision-making problems and subsequently develop algorithms that are provably optimal for addressing them, with a particular emphasis on multi-armed bandits.”

College of Engineering

Junior Writing Lecturer Jacob Dyer Spiegel 

Dyer Spiegel has joined the college as a Junior Writing Lecturer. He has 5+ years of teaching experience at UMass Amherst, having served as a lecturer in the ISOM Business Communication Program and a Visiting Lecturer of English. He has consulted with higher education institutions on the design and management of high-profile international scholarship programs and partnerships, and has 8+ years of experience directing study abroad and exchange programs in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Spain. He received a PhD in English and a BA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst. He also earned an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the Universidad de La Habana and SUNY Buffalo. He was a 2011 Fulbright Scholar. 

Article posted in Faculty for Faculty , Staff , Prospective students , Current students , Alumni , and Public

Related departments

  • Biomedical Engineering
  • Civil and Environmental Engineering
  • Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • Mechanical and Industrial Engineering

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