CoE Chooses Xia, Roberts, and Taneja for Its Outstanding Faculty Awards

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Qiangfei Xia, Jay Taneja, and Shannon Roberts

The College of Engineering (CoE) has selected Qiangfei Xia of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department as the winner of the 2023 Outstanding Senior Faculty Award, while Shannon Roberts of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department and Jay Taneja of the ECE department are the co-recipients of the CoE’s 2023 Barbara H. and Joseph I. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award.

Xia is an internationally renowned researcher in the field of emerging computing hardware, specifically memristor devices and their application in machine intelligence. He has recently published over 30 articles in the prestigious Nature and Science families of journals and was named a 2022 Clarivate Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher. According to Clarivate, in relation to the world’s population of scientists and social scientists, Highly Cited Researchers are one in 1,000.

Since arriving at UMass Amherst, Xia has secured over $14.2 million in external funding (his personal share is $9.9 million) to support his research; primarily from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Air Force, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

In 2023, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) elevated Xia to the status of Fellow for his contributions to resistive memory arrays and devices for in-memory computing. As an innovator, he co-founded TetraMem Inc., a Silicon-Valley-based startup specializing in artificial intelligence accelerators.

Students rate Xia’s teaching highly at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In that context, he adapted a senior-level microelectronics course into a lab-intensive curriculum in which students work in an instructional clean room making computer chips by themselves.

Xia is an active panelist for several funding agencies and foundations, such as the NSF, U.S. Department of Energy, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (or German Research Foundation), European Research Council, Humboldt Foundation, and others. He is also the 2023 conference chair for the International Conference on Electron, Ion, and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication.

Roberts has established a vibrant research program at the intersection of automobile-driver safety, automotive technologies, and transportation infrastructure, with a focus on improving health outcomes for drivers. Her research has attracted support from the NSF, Sloan Foundation, Toyota, and U.S. Department of Transportation.

Roberts is a dedicated teacher and mentor and has previously received the UMass Lilly Teaching Fellowship and the Industrial Engineering Professor of the Year Award. She is an active advocate and ambassador for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on and off campus, and she co-leads an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates Site Award on Research for Inclusivity and Driving Equity.

Roberts has also received the Stephanie Binder Young Professional Award, the Bentzi Karsh Early Career Service Award, and the 2023 College of Engineering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Faculty/Staff Award.

Roberts currently serves as the faculty advisor for the UMass Chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers and is the associate director for a $15-million Region 1 University Transportation Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Taneja has established a leading research program focused on applying sensing and communications technology to large-scale infrastructure. This technology, which includes embedded, mobile, and satellite-based systems, analyzes infrastructure in both developing and industrialized regions and empowers significant improvements to such systems.

Taneja has secured $18 million in external funding (his personal share is $5.4 million) from 10 different federal, state, international, industrial, and foundation sources to support his team’s research, and he leads a large multi-university collaboration called e-GUIDE (https://eguide.io/) funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

ECE undergraduate students have selected Taneja for three IEEE Tesla awards for outstanding undergraduate teaching. In addition, Taneja is a winner of the 2022 College of Engineering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Faculty Award for incorporating DEI principles into his research, teaching, and service.

Taneja has supervised the research of 10 Ph.D. students (nine come from backgrounds underrepresented in computing) and also founded and served as chair of ECE's DEI committee. He is a contributor to a pioneering textbook titled Introduction to Development Engineering: A Framework with Applications from the Field. This is the first textbook ever to introduce the new field of development engineering, which focuses on engineering improvements to boost the economies of developing regions. (May 2023)