Riccio College of Engineering Welcomes Seven New Faculty Members

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As of September of 2026, seven extremely accomplished academics will join the faculty of the Riccio College of Engineering. Emily Patterson is coming to UMass Amherst as the inaugural Marieb Endowed Professor of Nursing and Engineering Innovation. Her spouse, Theodore Allen, will become a member of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department as a full professor, and Bin Deng will enter the Biomedical Engineering (BME) Department as an associate professor. Meanwhile, Yongjin Choi (Civil and Environmental Engineering), Bashima Islam (Electrical and Computer Engineering or ECE), Aruna Jayasena (ECE), and Jinwei Zhang (BME) will be welcomed into the college as assistant professors.

Patterson’s professorship is a joint appointment between the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing and Riccio College of Engineering in the MIE department. She is a renowned industrial and systems engineer specializing in human factors and comes to UMass Amherst from The Ohio State University. She has over 250 publications cited more than 10,000 times and has secured more than $28 million in research funding. Her team's redesign of hospital telemetry alarm systems resulted in faster nurse responses to code-blue alarms and informed international standards in alarm sounds. Her research on patient handovers and bar-code-medication administration informed national guidance from The Joint Commission and the FDA. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. from Ohio State. 

Allen also comes to UMass Amherst from The Ohio State University, where he served as a Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Computer Science Engineering (Courtesy). He is the author of approximately 100 refereed publications focusing on security and efficiency analytics: manufacturing, cybersecurity, supply chains, and communications and behavior change. He has authored two textbooks published by Springer Verlag, including a third-edition textbook on engineering statistics. Allen is a Fellow of the American Society for Quality, is the past president of the INFORMS Social Media Analytics Section, and has been awarded approximately $11 million of research funding. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, his M.S. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his B.A. from Princeton.

Deng has been serving as an Assistant Professor of Radiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Her research integrates near-infrared (NIR) optical imaging, magnetic resonance elastography (MRE), and computational modeling to characterize vascular, metabolic, and biomechanical tissue properties. Deng investigates the intersection of physics, engineering, and medicine to seek novel functional imaging biomarkers and wearable technologies to address unmet clinical needs in cancer, women’s health, and neuroimaging. She previously worked at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in Charlestown, Massachusetts, as a postdoctoral research fellow. Deng obtained a Ph.D. from Syracuse University and her M.S. and B.S. from Tianjin University in China.

Choi arrives at UMass Amherst after serving as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology and a postdoctoral fellow and affiliated researcher in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. As he says, “My research aims to make geotechnical analysis more reliable, efficient, and autonomous through artificial intelligence and scientific computing. I focus on physics-aware AI simulators, inverse modeling, uncertainty quantification, and agentic AI systems for intelligent geohazard prediction, mitigation, and engineering decision support.” Choi received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.S. and B.S. from Pusan National University in South Korea.

Islam comes to UMass Amherst after serving for the past four years as an assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her research builds ubiquitous AI systems that learn from motion, audio, physiological, and ambient signals to help individuals, caregivers, and clinicians understand everyday human behavior. Her work focuses on multimodal representation learning, sensor-grounded language models, and resource-constrained inference on edge devices. Islam is an NSF CAREER Award recipient and has been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Science and an EECS Rising Star by the University of California, Berkeley. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her B.Sc. from the Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology.

Jayasena joins UMass from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he served as an assistant professor. He conducts research on secure and resilient computing systems, with a focus on computer architecture and systems security, emphasizing heterogeneous system design, trusted execution, and hardware-firmware co-validation to develop high-performance systems with strong guarantees of correctness and security. He says that “We build foundations for next-generation computing platforms that are high-performance, trustworthy, and adaptable to emerging workloads.” He received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the European Design and Automation Association for his Ph.D. research at the University of Florida, where he also earned his M.S. after completing his B.Sc. at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka.

Zhang comes to UMass Amherst after serving as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Johns Hopkins University. As he explains, “My research integrates quantitative neuroimaging and image analysis, with a focus on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to develop precision imaging biomarkers that characterize tissue-microstructural changes in neurodegenerative and age-related neurological disorders.” His focus includes quantitative MRI acquisition and reconstruction, multimodal neuroimaging analysis, applied machine learning in neuroimaging, and biomarkers of tissue microstructure. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell University and his B.S. from Sun Yat-sen University in China. (August 2026)