ECE welcomes new faculty

ECE is delighted to welcome these outstanding new faculty members to Michigan. These faculty broaden and deepen ECE’s areas of expertise in robotics, ultra low power circuits, nanophotonics, information theory, and many other areas.

Ehsan Afshari
Associate Professor
PhD, Electrical Engineering, 2006
California Institute of Technology

Ehsan conducts research in the area of high frequency (mm-Wave and Terahertz) circuits and systems for imaging, bio-sensing, and high data rate communication. He also works on low noise RF systems, non-Boolean image processing, and Spin-based circuits. Ehsan currently directs the Ultra-high-speed Nonlinear Integrated Circuit lab at Cornell. He received an NSF CAREER Award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, and a Cornell Excellence in Teaching award. Ehsan joined the faculty September, 2016.

Dmitry Berenson
Assistant Professor
PhD, Robotics, 2011
Carnegie Mellon University

Dmitry’s research focuses on creating algorithms that allow robots to interact
with the world and collaborate efficiently with people. These general-purpose motion planning and manipulation algorithms can be applied to robots that work in homes, factories, and operating rooms. Prof. Berenson was a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Berkeley before joining Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in 2012 as an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Engineering Program and Computer Science Department. At WPI, he founded the Autonomous Robotic Collaboration Lab. He received the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career award in 2016. Dmitry joined the faculty September 2016.

Mackillo Kira
Professor
PhD, Technical Physics and Theoretical and Computational Physics, 1996
Helsinki University of Technology, Finland

Mack’s research focuses on semiconductor quantum optics, quantum optics, condensed- matter theory, terahertz spectroscopy, many-body interactions, photon correlations, coherent and ultrafast phenomena, and cluster-expansion approach (both formalism and computing). His interdisciplinary research has had an impact on engineering, physics, chemistry, and nanotechnology. Mack has written more than 100 publications, many of which have been highly cited in the literature. He joins Michigan from Philipps University of Marburg, Germany, where he was Professor
of Physics. He received a Teacher of the Year Award, and is a Fellow of APS. He has graduated more than 40 PhD students, and co-authored the textbook, Semiconductor Quantum Optics. Mack joined the faculty September 2016.

Hun-Seok Kim
Assistant Professor
PhD, Electrical Engineering, 2010
University of California, Los AngelesHun-Seok’s research focuses on digital communication algorithms and systems, ultra low power / ultra high performance VLSI SoC architecture, computer vision and multimedia signal processing.Before joining the University of Michigan as an assistant research scientist in 2014, Prof. Kim worked as a technical staff member at Texas Instruments Embedded Processing Systems R&D Lab. He also served as an industry liaison for multiple university projects funded by Texas Instruments and the Semiconductor Research Corporation. He currently holds eight patents and has more than ten patents pending in the areas of digital communication, signal processing, and low power integrated circuits. Hun-Seok joined the faculty September 2016.

Hessam Mahdavifar
Assistant Professor
PhD, Electrical Engineering, 2012
University of California, San Diego

Hessam’s research interests are in the areas of communications, networks, and signal processing. More specifically, his research has focused on applications related to coding theory, information theory, algorithms, and game theory. These applications include wireless communications, security, data storage, Internet of Things, and social networks. Most recently, Hessam was a staff research engineer at Samsung Electronics in the San Diego Mobile Solutions Lab. He was also a visiting research scholar and lecturer at UCSD. He received the Best Paper Award at the 2015 IEEE International Conference on RFID, and holds six U.S. patents. He also received two silver medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Hessam will join the faculty January 2017.

Zetian Mi
Professor
PhD, Applied Physics, 2006
University of Michigan

Zetian’s research interests are in the areas of III-nitride semiconductors, low dimensional nanostructures, LEDs, lasers, Si photonics, and solar fuels. He has published eight book chapters and over 170 journal papers on these topics. Prof. Mi received the Young Scientist Award from the Int. Symp. on Compound Semiconductors and the Young Investigator Award from the 27th North American Molecular Beam Epitaxy Conference. Most recently, Prof. Mi was an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University, where he received several major awards including the Engineering Innovation Award. Prof. Mi is General Chair of 2016-2017 IEEE Photonics Society Summer Topical Meeting. Zetian joined the faculty in September 2016.

Mert Pilanci
Assistant Professor
PhD, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2016
University of California, Berkeley

Mert’s research interests are in the areas of convex optimization, statistics and information theory. His work enhancing machine learning, statistical inference and signal processing capabilities have an impact on a wide range of problems, including big data analytics, wireless communications and ad optimization. He received a Best Paper Award at the 2010 18th IEEE Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference and has given several invited talks at professional conferences. He is currently a Math+X postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Mert will join the faculty September 2017.