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College of Engineering Welcomes 11 New Faculty Members for the Fall of 2025

August 26, 2025 Faculty

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New Faculty 2025

Beginning in September, 11 dedicated and accomplished academics will join the faculty at the UMass Amherst College of Engineering (CoE), bolstering each of the CoE’s five departments: Biomedical Engineering (BME), Chemical Engineering (ChE), Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE). 

Tenure stream faculty:

Hongsoo Choi, who is a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Korean Academy of Science and Technology, will be joining our BME department as a Full Professor after serving as a Professor and the Chair of the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea. His research interests include micro/nanorobotic systems, neural engineering, magnetic-field-generating systems, BioMEMS, piezoelectric MEMS devices, and biochips for biomedical applications. His many prestigious awards include the Prime Minister’s Commendation for Science at the Information and Communication Day of Korea and the Prize of the State of Geneva with the 47th International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington State University.

Yanghyo (Rod) Kim joins the ECE department as an Associate Professor after working in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey as an Assistant Professor. Before joining Stevens, he developed space sensors and communication systems at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena as a Post Doctoral Scholar and worked as an Electronics Engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. He received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2025 and a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award in 2022. His lab studies integrated circuits and systems for millimeter-wave communication and science/technology. He graduated from UCLA with his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. 

Hsiao-Chuan Liu joins our BME department as an Assistant Professor after serving as a Research Assistant Professor in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC), and concurrently in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to USC, he was a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow and subsequently appointed as an Assistant Professor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. His research interests include ultrasound imaging, ultrasound elastography, ultrasound-based optical-coherence elastography, tissue and cell mechanics, elastic-wave theory and simulation, signal and image processing, acoustic tweezers, and clinical translation. His work explores novel imaging approaches that reduce the need for invasive biopsies in healthy tissues and support longitudinal monitoring of patients for the early detection of diseases. He earned his M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from National Yang Ming University, Taiwan, and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from USC.

Alec Linot has been serving as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and will be joining our ChE department as an Assistant Professor. Linot studies the modeling, control, and stability of chaotic dynamical systems, in which small perturbations to the system result in dramatically different dynamics over time. Two common examples include weather forecasting and turbulence. As he says, “Understanding how to model (or predict) these systems is of vital importance; for example, simply knowing when extreme-weather events will occur gives people time to prepare for said events. Controlling turbulent flows also presents a major opportunity to reduce the world’s energy consumption by mitigating turbulent drag.” He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and his B.S. from Kansas State University.

Saketh Sridhara joins our MIE department as an Assistant Professor after earning his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin Madison and his B.S. from the Rashtreeya Vidyalaya College of Engineering in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. As Sridhara says, “My research interests include engineering-design optimization, computational mechanics, and machine learning. Recently, I developed a novel approach for representing engineering data, such as materials and catalogs, using neural networks, enabling visualization, customization, and integration with gradient-based geometry optimization. My work encompasses both fundamental and applied research, focusing on developing novel design-optimization methods and computational frameworks for high performance and sustainability across multiple physics, multiple length scales, and multiple material systems.”

Holly Yanco joins as a Distinguished Professor (pending final Board of Trustee approval) in the MIE department with a joint appointment in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences. She was previously a Distinguished University Professor in the Richard A. Miner School of Computer and Information Sciences at UMass Lowell, where she directed the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center. For over 25 years, she has assembled and led a wide range of interdisciplinary collaborations to solve open problems in robotics and AI, including the NSF-funded AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING). Her research has been funded by agencies including NSF, ONR, NASA and DARPA, and she is a Fellow of both AAAI and AAAS. She has also taught at Boston College, ArsDigita University, and Wellesley College. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from MIT.

Chao Zhao comes to UMass Amherst from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Alabama to take on a joint appointment as Associate Professor in our BME and ChE departments. Zhao’s research primarily focuses on developing drug-delivery systems, biomaterials, medical devices, and novel therapeutics for disease treatment, with a particular emphasis on developing opioid alternatives for pain management. Zhao received his Ph.D. degree in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Akron and later was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan and the Harvard Medical School before joining the University of Alabama as an Assistant Professor in 2018.

Lecturers

Ehsan Roohi comes to our MIE department as a Lecturer after serving as a Visiting Associate Professor and Adjunct Professor in the Aerospace Engineering Department in the College of Engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. He earned his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. He has also served as an Associate Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China, a Professor at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran, a Research Fellow at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and a Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. Golkhatmi specializes in direct-simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) techniques and has contributed extensively to the field through his research on new collision models in DSMC and new micro-scales pumps working with heat dissipations.

Hemalatha Kanniyappan arrives in the BME department as a Lecturer after serving successively as a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Scientist, and Adjunct Teaching Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Before that, she was a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and, prior to that, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Rockford. She has also served as an Assistant Professor at Rajalakshmi Engineering College in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Her research focuses on biomaterials for tissue engineering and drug delivery, optical sensors, and the development of electrochemical biosensors for early cancer prediction. She earned her Ph.D. in Biotechnology from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India.

UMass Amherst alumnus Aaron Rubin returns to our CEE department as a Lecturer after serving as a Lecturer at Smith College since 2018. He is a professionally licensed geotechnical engineer with nearly 20 years of civil-engineering design and research experience. Rubin's research interests focus primarily on resilient infrastructure and energy and novel ground-penetrating-radar (GPR) applications, with specific experience in the thermal conduction of soils, quantitative GPR data collection, in situ railroad testing, and dam safety. He has six years of consulting experience, primarily in geotechnical-site evaluations, foundation and earthworks design, HVAC geothermal applications, preparation of geotechnical-contract documents, and construction observation. Rubin earned his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Tufts University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from UMass Amherst.

UMass Amherst alumna Mary Sheehan returns to our MIE department as a Lecturer and the Chief Undergraduate Advisor after earning her Ph.D. from that same department. While studying for her Ph.D. in 2022, Sheehan won a prestigious NSF Fellowship to do research on a pioneering tumor-biopsy technology, which she characterized as “needle-based volumetric tumor profiling,” by building mathematical models and the accompanying methodology for a more thorough, revealing, and accurate form of biopsy than is currently available. Her research utilized a process called “electroporation,” a technique used in the lab and clinic primarily for intracellular gene and drug delivery. Prior to her Ph.D. studies at UMass Amherst, she earned her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at UMass Amherst in 2017. Sheehan spent 2016 to 2020 working for Raytheon in Marlborough, Massachusetts, first as an intern and later as a mechanical engineer. 

Article posted in Faculty

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

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