Schaefer School of Engineering and Science newsletter header
Schaefer School of Engineering and Science newsletter header


NEWSLETTER | AUGUST 2025

DEAN'S OFFICE

Welcome to the 2025-26 Academic Year!

  • SES welcomes 10 new faculty members and lecturers joining us in the 2025-26 academic year:
    • Jinrui Cao, ECE Teaching Associate Professor
    • Gabriela Ciocarlie, CS Associate Professor & Stephen Bloom Associate Professor
    • Ellen Garven, BME Lecturer
    • Alexander Hoover, CS Assistant Professor
    • Marcin Iwanicki, CCB Teaching Associate Professor
    • Alex LaGrassa, CS Teaching Assistant Professor
    • Kai Li, CS Assistant Professor
    • Simon Mahler, BME Assistant Professor
    • Ryan Tsang, CS Teaching Assistant Professor
    • Tao Ye, CEOE Assistant Professor
 
  • Congratulations to the following faculty on their promotions, effective September 1, 2025:
    • Cheng Chen (Associate Professor [tenured], Civil, Environmental and Ocean Engineering): Promotion to Professor
    • Yu Gan (Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering): Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure
    • Jae-Chul Kim (Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering and Materials Sciences): Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure
    • Jinho Kim (Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering): Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure
    • Yue Ning (Assistant Professor, Computer Science): Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure  
    • Xian (Annie) Zhang (Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering): Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure  
 
  • Congratulations to the following faculty:
    • Kathrin Smetana, MS Assistant Professor, will serve as President of the CAREER Club at Stevens, effective September 1, 2025.
    • Antonia Zaferiou, BME Assistant Professor, received a one-year extension for her Stevens Presidential Fellowship award.
 
  • SES Events
    • SES New Faculty Orientation will be held on Tuesday, September 9, from 1-3 p.m. in McLean Hall 510.
    • The next SES Networking Ideas and Exchange (NIEx) Forum will be held on Monday, September 22, from 12-1:30 p.m. in Babbio 541A. The theme for this session is Promoting Undergraduate Research at the Cutting Edge.
    • SES Faculty Meeting will be held on Wednesday, October 22, from 3-5 p.m. in the UCC Tech Flex Auditorium.
 
  • Departmental Events
    • September 2 – CCB Memorial Tribute Professor Francis T. Jones
    • September 10 – CEOE Engineers at Ground Zero Film Screening
    • September 19 – CHI Next-Gen Healthcare Innovators Symposium  
 
  • Stevens Events
    • The President's Distinguished Lecture Series will be held on Wednesday, September 17, at 4 p.m. in the UCC Tech Flex Auditorium. Speaker: Dr. M. Stanley Whittingham, FRS, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering, Binghamton University. Register to attend. 

FUNDING NEWS

Ying Wang (SE)

Ying Wang (PI), SE Assistant Professor, received an NSF award of $600K for her project “CICI: UCSS: Programmable Wireless Infrastructure with Formal Assurance for Cross-Campus Research.”

In addition, she received the Early Career Program, ARO award of $360K for her project “From Proactive to Autonomous: Dynamic Assurance in CPS via Formal-Fuzz Interactions and Posterior Formal Verification.” Ying was a recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award earlier.

A portrait of Ying Wang

Zhuo Feng  (ECE) and Rod Kim (ECE)

Zhuo Feng (PI), ECE Professor, and Rod Kim (Co-PI), ECE Assistant Professor, received an NSF award of $600K for their project “OASIS: An Open-Source AI-Driven EDA Tool for Real-Time Synthesis of Short-Distance Wireless Interconnects on Silicon.”

A portrait of Zhuo Feng
A portrait of Rod Kim

Tegan Brennan (CS)

Tegan Brennan (PI), CS Assistant Professor, received an NSF CAREER award of $575K for her project “SaTC: Privacy-Aware Just-in-Time Compilation.”

A portrait of Tegan Brennan

Hongbin Li (ECE)

Hongbin Li (PI), ECE Charles and Rosanna Batchelor Memorial Chair Professor, received an NSF award of $400K for his project “NeTS: Small: Near-Field ISAC: Exploiting XL Arrays for Targeted Sensing and Communication.”

A portrait of Hongbin Li

Feng Liu (SE)

Feng Liu (PI), SE Assistant Professor, received an NIH award of $222K for his project “An Epileptic-Network Closed-Loop Stimulation Device (enCLS) Designed to Target and Arrest Ictogenesis,” with Rutgers University as prime.

A portrait of Feng Liu

Zhaozhuo Xu (CS)

Zhaozhuo Xu (PI), CS Assistant Professor, received two NSF awards: $171K for his project “CRII: III: Compression-Aware Computing for Sustainable Machine Learning Model Inference” and $50K for his project “Collaborative Research: Planning: CIRC: Planning-C: Building Foundation Model Infrastructure for Feature Interaction Discovery.”

A portrait of Zhaozhuo Xu

Kevin Connington (ME)

Kevin Connington (PI), ME Teaching Associate Professor, received an NSF award of $198K for his project "ERI: Dynamics and Rupture of Liquid Bridges Between Particles Under Extension, Shear, and Vibration via Lattice Boltzmann Simulations." 

A portrait of Kevin Connington

Raju Datla (CEOE)

Raju Datla (PI), Davidson Lab & CEOE Research Associate Professor, received a Leidos award of $137K for his project “Resistance and Seakeeping Performance Evaluation of a Commando Insertion Craft.” 

A portrait of Raju Datla

Jennifer Kang-Mieler (BME)

Jennifer Kang-Mieler (PI), George Meade Bond Professor, BME Department Chair and Director of CHI, received an NSF award of $92K for her project, “STTR Phase I: A Novel Biosensing Device for Rapidly Mapping Volumetric Tumor Margins,” with BullsEYE Biodevices Inc. as prime—founded by Jinho Kim (BME) and Dr. Mohammad Mir. 

A portrait of Jennifer Kang-Mieler
Portrait of Jinho Kim

Annie Zhang (ME)

Annie Zhang (PI), Assistant Professor, received an NSF award of $50K for her project “I-Corps: Tunable Moiré FETs Using 2D van der Waals Materials for Thermal-Optimized Flexible Electronics.” 

A portrait of Annie Zhang

FACULTY ACHIEVEMENTS

Onur Asan (SE)

Onur Asan, SE Assistant Professor, has been named a 2024 Top Scholar by ScholarGPS in the field of Medicine. He was ranked in the top 0.5% of all scholars worldwide. Based on his scholarly work in the last 5 years, he was also ranked in the top 0.11% in the field of Health Informatics and 0.65% of Artificial Intelligence researchers worldwide.

A portrait of Onur Asan

Eduardo Bonelli (CS)

Eduardo Bonelli, CS Teaching Professor, won the best paper award through the European Association for Programming Languages and Systems (EAPLS), for his paper "Sharing and Linear Logic with Restricted Access." 

A portrait of Eduardo Bonelli

Xiaohu Li (MS)

Xiaohu Li, MS Teaching Associate Professor, has been named a 2024 Top Scholar by ScholarGPS in the fields of Physical Sciences and Mathematics. He was ranked in the top 0.5% of all scholars worldwide. Based on his scholarly work in the last 5 years, he was also ranked in the top 0.38% in the field of Probability researchers worldwide.

Additionally, he was invited by the Editor-in-Chief of Communications in Statistics—a leading scientific journal in statistics—to serve as Associate Editor on the Editorial Board.

A portrait of Xiaohu Li

Dinesh Verma (SE)

Dinesh Verma, SE Professor and Executive Director of SERC, is the recipient of the 2025 INCOSE Pioneer Award. The award recognizes his work for pioneering the establishment and sustainment of the premier systems engineering research organization in SERC.

A portrait of Dinesh Verma

Shang Wang (BME)

Shang Wang, BME Assistant Professor, received the American Heart Association Innovative Project Award. 

A portrait of Shang Wang
 

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENTS

Best Student Paper Award Honorable Mention

Kun Wu, a final-year Ph.D. student, and his advisor, Dr. Wendy Hui Wang, received the Best Student Paper Award Honorable Mention at the ACM SIGKDD 2025 Conference in Toronto for their work on “Verification of Incomplete Graph Unlearning through Adversarial Perturbation.” SIGKDD is one of the world’s top data mining and machine learning conferences, with a 15% acceptance rate.

Photo of Ph.D student Kun Wu
 
 

Have you worked on an interesting project, or won an award or competition? 
Submit your student achievement to be considered for the next SES Newsletter. 

 

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EVENTS 

Abbreviation of September
One

Labor Day — No Classes; Offices Closed

 

09/01/25: Labor Day — No Classes; Offices Closed

 

09/02/25: First Day of Fall 2025 Semester Classes

 

09/02/25: CCB Memorial Tribute Professor Francis T. Jones

 

09/03/25: New Student Convocation

 

09/09/25: New Faculty Orientation

 

09/10/25: CEOE Engineers at Ground Zero Film Screening

 

09/16/25: Conversation with the President

 

09/17/25: President's Distinguished Lecture Series

 

09/19/25: CHI Next-Gen Healthcare Innovators Symposium  

 

09/22/25: Networking Ideas and Exchange (NIEx) Forum

 

09/24/-26/25: 2025 DSM Conference (The 27th International Dependency and Structure Modelling Conference)

 

The archive of past SES Newsletters can be found here.

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