Welcome to New Faculty Members Sean McBeath and Xuan “Silvia” Zhang

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The UMass Amherst College of Engineering welcomes two very talented new faculty members for the spring semester of 2023. Sean McBeath arrives as an assistant professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department after serving as a postdoctoral research associate at the California Institute of Technology. Meanwhile, Xuan “Silvia” Zhang comes to UMass from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was a tenured associate professor, and assumes the position of associate professor in our Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department.

McBeath’s research specialties are small, remote, and decentralized water and wastewater treatment, electrochemical processes for organic and inorganic pollutant abatement, electrosynthesis of water treatment oxidants, and point-of-sampling pathogen/contaminant detection.

Before his time at Cal Tech, McBeath was a sessional lecturer at the University of British Columbia from 2019 to 2021, a Ph.D. researcher at Imperial College London from 2017 to 2021, and a research associate at Canada’s RESEAU Centre for Mobilizing Innovation in 2017.

Among other honors, McBeath was a Rapid Wastewater SARS-CoV-2 Testing Challenge Winner at the Water Environment Federation/Centers for Disease Control in 2022, he was awarded a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship-Doctoral Scholarship for 2018 through 2021, and he received an Imperial College London President’s Scholarship from 2017 to 2021.

McBeath earned his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Imperial College London, and his M.A.Sc. and B.A.Sc. in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the University of British Columbia.

Before arriving at UMass Amherst, Zhang was an associate professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Zhang received her Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University in China, and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University.

Zhang’s research focuses include hardware/software co-design for efficient machine learning and artificial intelligence, novel neuromorphic sensors and processors, hardware security primitives in analog and mixed-signal domain, and adaptive resource management for autonomous systems. She is especially interested in how to build, miniaturize, and optimize autonomous systems for performance, reliability, security, and energy efficiency, with diverse applications in cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things, and autonomous robotics.

Among other honors, Zhang is an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Circuits and Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2022-2023, was honored with an IEEE St. Louis Section Outstanding Researcher and Outstanding Women in Engineering award in 2022, and received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2020. She also received an ISLPED Best Paper Award in 2022, an Asian HOST Best Paper Award in 2020, a DATE Best Paper Award in 2019, and an ISLPED Design Contest Award in 2013. (January 2023)