HR Notices From Sept. 3
Wayne State Welcomes New Engineering, Computer Science Faculty: The Wayne State University College of Engineering is pleased to announce the addition of six outstanding researchers, scholars and assistant professors to its faculty. They are Leela Arava, mechanical engineering; Guru Dinda, mechanical engineering; Alexander Kotov, computer science; Mai Lam, biomedical engineering; Haipeng Liu, chemical engineering; and Jeremy Rickli, industrial and systems engineering.
Arava's research interests are in electrochemistry and electromechanical engineering, electrochemical degradation of materials and corrosion resistant coatings, growth and applications of Graphene, development of green and sustainable lithium battery electrodes from natural resources, development of non-noble metal based electrocatalysts for polymer electrolyte fuel cells, investigation of hydrogen storage properties of certain metal organic frameworks, metal hydrides, and carbon composites. Arava most recently served as a postdoctoral research fellow and as a research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Material Science at Rice University in Houston. He has authored a book chapter and several journal articles, co-holds eight patents, and has spoken at nearly 50 conferences. Additionally, Arava is a founding member of the Indian Association for Hydrogen Energy and Advanced Materials. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, in 2007.
Dinda's research interests include bulk nanocrystalline materials, laser materials processing, friction stir welding and processing, additive manufacturing, severe plastic deformation, superalloys, amorphous materials, and biomaterials. He previously worked as a materials scientist for Focus: HOPE's Center for Advanced Technologies and as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan. Dinda, who has also given lectures at U-M, has published more than 20 journal articles, spoken at a variety of conferences and serves as a reviewer on several industry journals. He earned a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of Saarland, Saarbrucken, Germany in 2006.
Kotov's research interests are in large-scale textual data analysis including textual data mining, information retrieval and health informatics. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University in the Intelligent Information Access Laboratory. His work has been published at major information retrieval conferences and he has served on the program committees of major information retrieval, natural language processing and big data conferences. Additionally, Kotov was a recipient of DAAD/Siemens Fellowship and the Best Reviewer Award at the 2012 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011.
Lam's research focuses on the study and use of tissue mechanics to design effective treatment approaches for repairing a given tissue using biomaterials and/or stem cells. She aims to create methods for repairing damaged tissues and translating these technologies to patients. Lam most recently served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Surgery and Cardiovascular Imaging at the Stanford University School of Medicine's Stem Cell Institute for Regenerative Medicine. She has a great deal of additional research experience in academia at U-M and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and industry experience at companies such as Incept Biosystems in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Tissue Genesis in Honolulu. She has written a number of journal articles and given presentations at international conferences. Lam earned a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from U-M in 2006.
Liu's research focuses on the integration of synthetic chemistry and materials engineering for improving vaccines against infectious diseases and cancer. He was a postdoctoral associate at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2009-13. Before joining MIT, Haipeng conducted research at the University of Florida to develop a molecular engineering approach for DNA aptamer. He has co-authored three patents and more than 30 scientific manuscripts, and his research articles have been cited more than 1,600 times. Haipeng earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at Purdue University in 2007.
Rickli's primary research interests include end-of-life product value recovery, sustainability, and manufacturing process and system improvement. His aims to study the impact of end-of-life product uncertainty on remanufacturing operations, and investigate how big data can enhance manufacturing and sustainability. Rickli received his Ph.D. from the Virginia Tech Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in 2013.
