Three EECS faculty members granted tenure, promotion
May 20, 2015 – Electrical Engineering’s Sven Bilén and Vishal Monga and Computer Science and Engineering’s Sean Hallgren were recently promoted within their respective departments in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Engineering.
Bilén, who joined Penn State in 2000, was promoted to full professor. He received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Penn State and his master’s in engineering and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan. In 2010, he was named head of the School of Engineering Design, Technology, and Professional Programs at Penn State.
Bilén’s research interests, coordinated through his direction of the Systems Design Laboratory, include the areas of space systems design; electrodynamic tethers; plasma diagnostics; software-defined radio techniques and systems; wireless sensor systems; innovative engineering design, systems design and new product design; and global and virtual engineering design. He is the author of numerous journal papers and conference publications, and is the recipient of the 2008 Lawrence J. Perez Memorial Student Advocate Award, the 2003 Penn State Engineering Alumni Society Outstanding Advising Award and the Department of Electrical Engineering’s 2002 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Monga, who joined Penn State in 2009, was awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor. He received his bachelor’s degree in electronics and communications engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Texas, Austin.
Monga spent four years (2005-2009) at Xerox Research Labs and has also been a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research. He was also a visiting faculty at the University of Rochester. His research interests are in convex optimization methods in imaging, image processing and signal/image classification. Monga received a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2015, the top 10 percent paper award at Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineering (IEEE) Multimedia Signal Processing in 2009 and 2011, the Young Engineer of the Year Award from Rochester Engineering Society in 2007 and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology Raymond Davis Scholarship in 2004.
Hallgren, who joined the computer science and engineering faculty in 2007, was promoted to full professor. He received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and his doctoral degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
Prior to joining Penn State, Hallgren was a senior research staff member and head of the Quantum Information Technology Group at NEC Laboratories America, Inc. He was also a visiting lecturer at Princeton University, an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech in the Institute for Quantum Information and the Computer Science Department, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. In 2009, Hallgren received the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for his work in the area of quantum computation, which aims to use quantum mechanical systems for computation.