In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re taking a look at the tenure female-line faculty in the College of Engineering and Computing. These amazing women have carried out preeminent research, brought in millions of dollars in funding, pioneered new advancements, and received prestigious grants and awards.
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Ranu Jung, Wallace H. Coulter Eminent Scholars Chair of Biomedical Engineering and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, views biomedical engineering as an exciting journey, or as a mystery novel she gets to solve. Read more about her passion for the field and her amazing discoveries here. Anuradha Godavarty’s interests lie in optical imaging technologies towards breast cancer imaging, functional brain mapping, and wound imaging applications. Jessica C. Ramella-Roman’s lab, the Medical Photonics Laboratory, conducts research in bio-photonics and focuses on the investigation of non-invasive methodologies for diagnosis of disease based on light-tissue interaction.
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Berrin Tansel has been a Panther for almost thirty years. Her primary areas of interest are water treatment; hazardous and industrial waste management; landfill processes and release mechanisms; and sustainable sludge treatment and recovery. She received recognition for ‘Technology Development and Application that Benefit the NASA-KSC and Nation through the Vision of Space’ from the NASA Kennedy Space Center, among other awards and honors. Xia Jin’s research advances the understanding of travel choices and the associated user heterogeneity in responding to system changes. Her recent research also focuses on integrated urban models in accounting for the connections between transportation and economic, environmental and social objectives.
Laha Sonali’s areas of interest include physicochemical and microbial processes affecting the fate of organic and inorganic contaminants in natural soil and water systems, hazardous waste treatment technologies and environmental protection in developing countries. Priyanka Alluri studies transportation safety, and her research has focused on a wide range of topics, including advanced safety analysis models, implementation of the Highway Safety Manual (HSM) and SafetyAnalyst, pedestrian and bicycle safety, safety design of traffic control devices, and human factors in transportation. She’s also participated in the ADVANCE Florida network, both as a visitor and as a host. Amal Elawady’s academic background is in the field of structural and wind engineering. Her studies involve large-scale wind tunnel testing, wind effects analysis to examine structural response, and design of structures against extreme wind events.
Moss School of Construction, Infrastructure and Sustainability
Lu Zhang is the only female faculty member, but that doesn’t stop her from bringing a human touch to construction. Read more about how Zhang finds synergy between human values and built environments here.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Mercedes Cabrerizo focuses on signal and image processing applied to neurosciences, and specifically to neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and schizophrenia. She works with the the Brain Institute at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital and the neurology department at Baptist hospital on image processing and 3D source localization.
Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering
Daniela Radu has spent several years as an industrial scientist at the DuPont Experimental Station’s Central Research Department in the Division of Materials Science and Engineering, one of the foremost industrial laboratories devoted to basic science. She’s also an AWED Diversity Mentor Professor. Chunlei Wang’s work in micro and nanofabrication methods for building novel micro and nanostructures has garnered her several honors, including a Guest Scientist Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute and an FIU Faculty Research and Creative Activities Award.
School of Computing and Information Sciences
Christine Lisetti is the Director of the Affective Social Computing Laboratory. Her research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction, affective computing, artificial intelligence, emotion and personality theories, and social communication. Her long-term research goal is to create VIrtual Social AGEnts (VISAGEs) that can interact naturally with humans with verbal and nonverbal communication. Liting Hu’s research is in the general area of distributed systems and its intersection with big data analytics, resource management, power management and system virtualization.
Monique Ross, who also has an appointment in the FIU STEM Transformation Institute, focuses on broadening participation in engineering through the exploration of race, gender, and identity in the engineering workplace and discipline-based education research (with a focus on computer science and computer engineering courses). Wei Zeng’s research interests focus on the discrete theories, computational algorithms, and practical applications of geometric analysis, with further interest in 3D computer vision. Niki Pissinou has published over two hundred and fifty research papers in peer reviewed journals, conference proceedings and books chapters on networking, telecommunications, distributed systems, mobile computing, security and aspects of nontraditional data management.
Enterprise and Logistics Engineering
Shabnam Rezapour is interested in network-based complex systems, supply chain management, facility locations, and logistics.
School of Universal Computing, Construction, and Engineering Education (SUCCEED)
Trina Fletcher and Alexandra Coso Strong are dedicated to making SUCCEED, new school dedicated to engineering and computing education research and curricular transformation, a success. Read more about their plans here.
