Department of

Electrical Engineering

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Five tenure-track faculty members join the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2015-16

Weihua Guan is an assistant professor in electrical engineering. He joined EECS in January 2015. He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China; a master’s degree in microelectronics and solid-state electronics from Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China; and master of science, master of philosophy and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from Yale University. Prior to joining Penn State, Guan was a postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include medical devices, bio-electronics, biosensors, lab-on-a-chip devices and point-of-care testing.

Xingjie Ni is an assistant professor in electrical engineering. He received a bachelor’s in engineering physics and a master’s in control science and engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University. He will be joining Penn State from the Center for Scalable and Integrated Nanomanufacturing at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is a postdoctoral scholar. His research interests are in are in nanophotonics and optoelectronics, electromagnetic metamaterials, optical sensing, transformation optics devices, integrated photonics, nonlinear optics, optical communications, sub-wavelength signal processing, photovoltaics, and optical quantum information processing.

Rebecca Passonneau will be a professor in computer science and engineering. She received her bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in linguistics from the University of Chicago. She will be joining the School in July 2016, from Columbia University, where she is the director of the Center for Computational Learning Systems and a senior research scientist. Her research interests include semantic analysis of large-scale textual sources for prediction, meaning and action in human-machine dialogue, data mining that links textual and non-textual sources, and word sense annotation using crowdsourcing and probabilistic models.

Gang Tan is an associate professor in computer science and engineering. He received his bachelor’s of engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and his doctorate in computer science from Princeton University. Tan will be joining Penn State from the Security of Software Lab at Lehigh University, where he is an associate professor. His research interests include modular control-flow integrity, interface safety in multilingual software, and user-space privilege separation.

Danfeng Zhang is an assistant professor in computer science and engineering. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Peking University in Beijing, China, and his doctorate from Cornell University. His research interests lie in the intersection of security and programming languages, with a focus on designing programming models with rigorous security guarantees and minimal burden on programmers.