New Faculty Hires for Fall 2019
Lassonde is excited to welcome six new faculty members in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering & Computer Science.
Marina Freire-Gormaly, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering
Freire-Gormaly’s team’s research focuses on the development of stand-alone solar-powered reverse osmosis water treatment systems and energy recovery systems for remote communities that lack access to grid electricity. She completed her Ph.D. and M.A.Sc. from the University of Toronto in Mechanical Engineering.
She was drawn to the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University for her career in academia based on the vibrant community of researchers, staff and students, the cutting-edge research facilities, and the transdisciplinary research environment the faculty and university offers. She is looking forward to collaborating with colleagues at York towards innovative collaborative tools and solutions for Canada’s remote Indigenous communities to resolve water and energy challenges in these communities.
Cuiying Jian, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering
Dr. Jian is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and will join York University on August 1st. The young and vibrant atmosphere provided by Lassonde inspires her to pursue an academic career at York University.
Prior to joining MIT, Dr. Jian served as a sessional instructor at MacEwan University and worked as a postdoctoral fellow as well as a sessional instructor at the University of Alberta (U of A). She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (2015) from the U of A and obtained her M.S. in Mechatronics Engineering (2011) and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (2009) from Harbin Institute of Technology.
Her research interests lie in engineering carbonaceous materials for applications in energy, environment, and electronics. She is looking forward to joining Lassonde for the next chapter of her career.
Reza Rizvi, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering
Prior to joining York University on July 1st, Reza was an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio, USA.
He is a PhD graduate from the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and a BASc graduate from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto.
Previously, Reza held the prestigious NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chemistry Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and before that he held the Canadian National Center of Excellence TVN postdoctoral fellowship at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute.
His past work includes developing materials for non-slip winter footwear, flexible pressure sensing nanocomposites, developing fully bio-based green composites for the automotive industry, and consulting with the automotive industry for environmental testing of automotive rubbers and plastics.
Hamzeh Khazaei, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Dr. Khazaei was an Assistant Professor in Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of University of Alberta. He is the founding director of Dependable Distributed Systems Lab (DDSL) at ECE Department.
Previously, he was a research associate at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Manitoba in 2013 where he extended queuing theory and stochastic processes to accurately model the performance and availability of cloud computing systems.
His research on cloud, performance modelling, big data management, and intelligent systems has attracted a lot of attention from the government, media and research community through increased funding, frequent citations, partnership with various industries, a number of best paper awards and spotlight recognitions from top-tier journals and conferences.
Pirathayini Srikantha, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Dr. Srikantha received her B.A.Sc. degree in Systems Design Engineering in 2009 and her M.A.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2013 both from the University of Waterloo. She obtained her Ph.D. degree from The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto in 2017. She is a certified Professional Engineer (P.Eng.) in Ontario.
Her main research interests are in the areas of game theory, large-scale optimization and distributed control for enabling adaptive, sustainable and resilient power grid operations.
She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Western University. She will be joining York University in the Fall of 2019 and is excited to join the vibrant academic environment and actively participate in fostering today’s “Renaissance Engineers”.
Song Wang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Wang received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo. His research interests include software engineering, software reliability, program analysis, and machine learning; with a focus on developing automated systems that combine machine learning technologies and program analysis to predict and detect software bugs for improving software reliability. The tools and techniques developed by him have already been integrated into practice and helped detect hundreds of true bugs on a large number of open-source and commercial projects.