New Faculty - College of Engineering

The College of Engineering is committed to pushing boundaries and breaking barriers. 

This fall, seven new professors will join the college, adding to the list of great minds working in departments ranging from aerospace to electrical and computer engineering. They are among 54 new faculty members joining the SDSU family this semester — the largest cohort of faculty to be hired by SDSU since the 2007/2008 academic year.

Department of Aerospace Engineering

Xiaofeng Liu, Ph.D. (University of Notre Dame, 2001) Liu, an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, is a leading expert in experimental fluid dynamics. His work and education experience includes Johns Hopkins University, University of Notre Dame, Tsinghua University, China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology and Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His research interests broadly reside in high-lift aerodynamics, turbulent shear layer and wake flows, vortex dynamics, cavitation, fluid-structure interactions, acoustics, heat and mass transfer, particle image velocimetry and image processing. His current focus is on the development of time-resolved non-intrusive 3-D pressure field measurement techniques and their applications in the study of turbulence and unsteady aerodynamics.

Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering

Alicia M. Kinoshita, Ph.D. (University of California, Los Angeles, 2012) Kinoshita is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering.

Natalie Mladenov, Ph.D. (University of Colorado at Boulder, 2004) Mladenov is an environmental engineer with expertise in biological and geochemical processes that influence water quality in natural and impacted systems. Mladenov’s research combines field, experimental and advanced genetic and optical spectroscopic techniques to investigate interactions between microbes, natural organic matter and pollutants in diverse environments from alpine streams to treated wastewater. Her research interests include groundwater pollution in arsenic-contaminated aquifers, dust and atmospheric deposition influences on surface water quality, treatment of industrial wastewater with constructed wetlands, tracking of organic pollutants in water reuse applications, and sustainable water and sanitation systems.

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ke Huang, Ph.D. (University of Grenoble, France, 2011) Huang’s research focuses on applications of data mining and machine learning in hardware security, integrated circuit (IC) reliability, and analog/radio-frequency (RF) IC testing. His areas of interest include counterfeit IC detection and avoidance based on machine learning, development of concurrent hardware Trojan detection techniques, specification test cost reduction of analog/RF ICs based on wafer-level spatial correlation models, and fault modeling and diagnosis of integrated circuits based on artificial intelligence. Huang was a recipient of the Best Paper Award from the 2013 Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE’13) conference.

Reza Sabzehgar, Ph.D. (Simon Fraser University, 2012) Sabzehgar specializes in several areas related to electrical engineering including power electronics, energy harvesting, renewable energies, control applications in sustainable energy systems, mechatronics and electric and hybrid electric vehicles. His current research is focused on power electronics converters with application to energy harvesting from renewable energy sources and smart grids. Sabzehgar has published several articles in high impact factor journals and high quality conference proceedings in the above areas sponsored by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Kaveh Akbari Hamed, Ph.D. (Sharif University of Technology, Iran, 2011) Before joining San Diego State University, Hamed was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. His research interests span control theory, robotics, legged locomotion, hybrid dynamical systems and optimization. He develops nonlinear feedback control solutions for dynamical models ranging from robotic systems to power systems. The results of his research can be used for achieving stable, agile and robust locomotion in legged robots. They can also be used to improve the control of existing robots, mechanical systems interrupted by collision, and also to provide guidelines for improving the mechanical design of future controlled prosthetic legs.

Ilenia Battiato, Ph.D. (University of California, San Diego, 2010) Battiato is an engineering scientist with specialization in computational sciences and fluid mechanics. Her research interests lie in theoretical/computational fluid mechanics and transport processes in porous media and crowded environments; multiscale, mesoscale and hybrid methods; effective medium theories; superhydrophobicity and drag reduction; and granular matter. Her research spans a wide range of scales, applications and modeling techniques including discrete-and continuum-scale models of flow and transport in porous media (e.g., intracellular environment, carbon nanotube forests, mesoporous ultracapacitors), fluidization/jamming of granular matter, and effective medium theories of laminar/turbulent flows over complex. She tackles these problems with a combination of theoretical and computational approaches including multiscale and hybrid methods, effective medium theories, perturbation methods, homogenization and upscaling techniques.

Peiman N. Mousavi, Ph.D. (Villanova University, 2012) Mousavi is a researcher specializing in nonlinear dynamics and control.  His areas of interest include nonlinear dynamics, smart valves, nonlinear control, electromechanical systems, biped robots, mathematical modeling, optimization, and PMEM magnet bearings. He is presently researching biped and soft robots and coupled electromechanical systems.