ECE welcomes four new faculty for 2013-14 academic year

We are delighted to welcome four outstanding new faculty members to ECE. They broaden and deepen ECE’s areas of expertise in several areas: designing nanophotonic tools for medical applications; improving the nation’s power system including its cost and its impact on the environment; finding ways to improve the information retrieved from sensory data in order to design better cyber-physical systems; and manufacturing micro to nano-sized electronic materials, devices, and circuits.

Somin Lee
Assistant Professor

PhD, Bioengineering
UC-Berkeley

Somin Lee’s research is focused on engineering nanophotonic instrumentation to quantitatively analyze complex biological systems and improve cellular therapies. She is specifically interested in the design and implementation of tools enabling enhanced spatial and temporal control for the development of “smart” nano-devices, single-molecule imaging, and tunable nanomedicine. Somin has 2 U.S. patents. She is currently an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and will join the faculty January 2014.

Johanna Mathieu
Assistant Professor

PhD, Mechanical Engineering
UC-Berkeley

Johanna Mathieu’s research focuses on ways to reduce the environmental impact, cost, and inefficiency of electric power systems through new operational and control strategies. She is particularly interested in developing new methods to actively engage distributed flexible resources such as energy storage, electric loads, and distributed renewable resources in power system operation. Johanna has been a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania where she taught applied mathematics and physics to Tanzanian secondary school students. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich in the Power Systems Laboratory, and will join the faculty January 2014.

Necmiye Ozay
Assistant Professor

PhD, Electrical Engineering
Northeastern University

Necmiye Ozay’s research interests lie at the broad interface of dynamical systems, control, optimization and formal methods with applications in system identification and validation, autonomy and vision. She is particularly interested in developing novel event detection/information extraction algorithms from sensory data and designing robust cyber-physical systems that can autonomously react to these events and perform complex tasks in dynamic environments. Most recently, Necmiye was a Control and Dynamical Systems postdoctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology.

Rebecca L. Peterson
Assistant Professor

PhD, Electrical Engineering
Princeton University

Becky Peterson’s research focuses on solution-processed methods for manufacturing inorganic electronic materials, devices, and circuits. She is particularly interested in ink-based approaches to make thin film transistors, transparent conducting oxides, and other functional or electronic materials. Her work encompasses nanoparticle-based electronics and sensors, self-assembled nanopatterning techniques, and electro-mechanical properties of thin films for flexible sensors and electronics, and for their integration in a variety of microsystems. Becky was a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge before coming to Michigan in 2009 as an assistant research scientist.