College of Engineering Welcomes Four New Faculty Members
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This fall the College of Engineering welcomes four very talented new faculty members to its ranks: Assistant Professor Dmitry Kireev and Assistant Professor Jingjing Gao of the Biomedical Engineering (BME) Department; Assistant Professor Muhammad Taqi Raza of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department; and Lecturer Ali Bagheri, who will be serving in the Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) Interdisciplinary Graduate Program.
At UMass Amherst, Kireev says he will be “kicking off the 2D Bioelectronics Lab at the interface of biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, and 2D materials.” His research interests lie mostly in the field of wearable and implantable bioelectronics. Bioelectronics range from applications of graphene and other 2D materials to wearable biosensors, bioelectronics, neuro-electronics, neuronal networks measurements and in vivo probes, advanced biosensors, biomedical devices, and building next-generation 2D hybrids.
Kireev has most recently been working as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Texas at Austin since 2020.
Kireev earned his Ph.D. in Physics/Bioelectronics in 2017 from Forschungszentrum Julich & RWTH Aachen in Germany. He also received an M.Sc. in Nanoelectronics in 2013 from Chalmers University of Technology in Goteborg, Sweden, and KULeuven in Belgium. He earned an M.Sc. and a B.Sc. in Engineering and Nanotechnology from the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Moscow.
Gao comes to UMass Amherst after serving as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School since May of 2021. She has accumulated highly interdisciplinary research experience in biomaterials, nanoparticle formulation, gene therapy, material chemistry, and drug delivery. Her lab will be advancing a biomaterial-based drug-delivery system and medical devices, particularly in the context of neurological diseases such as traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer’s disease.
Gao earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry from UMass Amherst in 2019, her M.S. degree in Chemical Engineering Technology from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China in 2014, and her B.S. in Applied Chemistry from South-central Minzu University in China in 2011.
Raza arrives at the ECE department after serving as an assistant professor in the Information Systems Department at the University of Arizona.
Raza received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to that, he worked as a senior research engineer in LG Electronics, located in Seoul, Korea. He earned his B.S. in Information Technology from the National University of Sciences and Technology in Pakistan.
Raza’s research focuses on the security and reliability of mobile and cloud networked systems, autonomous vehicles’ security and their interaction with humans, and security of financial technologies. As he says about building secure and reliable networked systems, “My research identifies fundamental open questions and explores them from various angles. It contributes to better understanding of the state-of-the-art network systems by challenging their operational efficacy and identifying unexplored aspects at their heterogeneity. It provides simple and innovative solutions from system designs to their operations through verification.”
Bagheri will be serving in the MSE Program, an interdepartmental, cross-disciplinary program comprised of distinguished faculty and talented students drawn from all five College of Engineering departments, as well as the Physics and Chemistry departments.
Bagheri arrives at the College of Engineering from the University of New England in Australia, where he has served as a tenured lecturer in the Chemistry Department since 2020. He was invited as a guest lecturer to the University of New South Wales in Australia from 2019 to 2020. He has also been a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Auckland in New Zealand from 2018 to 2019. At those various universities, he has also conducted sophisticated research in macromolecules, 3D printing, and drug-delivery systems.
Bagheri earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of New South Wales, His M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University Technology Malaysia, and his B.S. in Polymer Industrial Engineering from Shiraz University (Pardis Branch) in Iran. (August 2023)
