We welcome the following faculty to their new roles at the college!

Nikolaos Vitzilaios, assistant professor, Mechanical Engineering

Vitzilaios received a Ph.D. from the Technical University of Crete, Greece, in 2010. Prior to joining the University of South Carolina (USC) he was a senior lecturer in robotics at Kingston University London, UK   (2016-2017), and a research scientist at the University of Denver (2012-2016). His research interests span  the areas of autonomous unmanned systems and mobile robotics with a focus on aerial robotics. Vitzilaios is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK.

Subramani Sockalingam, assistant professor, Mechanical Engineering 

Sockalingam received a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 2016.  He joined USC as a research assistant professor in 2016. Sockalingam’s research interests include development of advanced composite materials that are lightweight and stronger through a multiscale experimental and computational approach for aerospace, automotive and defense applications.

Yi Wang, associate professor, Mechanical Engineering

Wang received a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in 2005. Prior to joining USC, he held several positions of increasing responsibility at the CFD Research Corporation in Huntsville, Al. His main research focuses are advanced methodologies and techniques in computational and data-enabled science and engineering, including reduced order modeling, data reduction, large-scale and/or real-time data analytics, hierarchical system-level simulation and system engineering.

Yu Qian, assistant professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Qian received a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014.  Prior to joining USC, he was a research engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He has been working on transportation infrastructure related research for the last nine years, mainly focusing on railroad infrastructure, geosynthetic pavement, high-speed rail, discrete element simulation and image analysis.   

 

Lannan Luo, assistant professor, Computer Science and Engineering
Luo received a Masters from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in 2012 and a Ph.D. from Penn State in 2017. Luo's research mainly focuses on software and systems security, including mobile security, IoT security, malware analysis, vulnerability analysis, programming languages, software engineering, and deep learning.

 

 

Yonghong Yan, assistant professor, Computer Science and Engineering 

Yan received a Ph.D. from the University of Houston in 2014. Prior to joining USC, he was an assistant professor at Oakland University. Yan is an expert in parallel and high performance computing, and his research team develops software tools and hardware to support applications ranging from classical HPC to big data analysis and machine learning. Yan became a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER awardee in 2017.

 

John R. Monnier, professor, Chemical Engineering (NAE member) 

Monnier received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1978. Prior to joining USC as a research professor in 2004 he was employed by Eastman Kodak (later Eastman Chemical) for 30 years. His research interests include heterogeneous catalysis, bimetallic catalyst synthesis and reaction kinetics. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017.

 

William Mustain, professor, Chemical Engineering 

Mustain received a Ph.D. from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2006. Prior to joining USC, he was an associate professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Connecticut. Some of his research interests include Electrochemical CO2 Separation and Concentration, and material development for batteries and fuel cells.

 

Dongkyu Lee, assistant professor, Mechanical Engineering

Lee received a Ph.D. from MIT and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Lee's research group is focused on designing and understanding functional complex oxides in forms of thin films and nanostructures for energy conversion and storage devices.

 

 

Ming Hu, associate professor, Mechanical Engineering 

Hu received a Ph.D. from the Institute of Mechanics at the Chinese Academy of Science and is currently an associate professor at Aachen University, Germany.

 

 

Kostas Kyriakopoulos, professor, Mechanical Engineering

Kyriakopoulos received a Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is an IEEE fellow and is currently a professor at National Technical University of Athens, Greece.

Jorge Crichigno, associate professor, Integrated Information Technology

Crichigno received a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico is currently an associate professor at Northern New Mexico College.