Skip to content

Faculty

Eva de Alba

  • Structural Biology
  • Biophysics
  • Biochemistry of macromolecules and macromolecular assemblies (emphasis on inflammation and cellular death)
  • Protein Engineering
  • NMR Spectroscopy

John Abatzoglou Headshot

John Abatzoglou

Professor and Graduate Program Chair (MIST)

jabatzoglou@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SSM 210A

Professor Abatzoglou is interested in the hows and whys of climate and weather, and also the so whats. His lab's work spans many topics - from addressing questions on climate variability, to understanding climate impacts on natural resources, to developing climate datasets and tools. 

Roberto Andresen Eguiluz

  • Biolubrication
  • Mechanobiology
  • Adhesion of biological, biologically inspired, and synthetic molecules

Ahmed Arif

Ahmed Arif

Assistant Professor

asarif@ucmerced.edu

  • Smarter solutions for text entry, error correction, and editing on various devices
  • Mobile interaction, tangible user interfaces, child-computer interaction, usable security, and scientific data visualization

Venkattraman (Venkatt) Ayyaswamy

Venkattraman (Venkatt) Ayyaswamy

Associate Professor

vayyaswamy@ucmerced.edu

(209) 228-2359

SRE 365

  • Stochastic methods for engineering applications
  • Non-equilibrium fluid mechanics and plasma physics
  • Simulating plasma processing of nanostructured materials
  • Nano/microfluidics and microplasma

Roger Bales

  • Ecosystem climate solutions
  • Water resources
  • Hydrology

Mehmet Z. Baykara

Mehmet Z. Baykara

Associate Professor and Graduate Program Chair (ME)

mehmet.baykara@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

(209) 228-3371

SRE 359

  • Nanomechanics
  • Nanotribology
  • Scanning Probe Microscopy
  • Surface Science

Marc Beutel

Professor and Department Chair (CEE)

mbeutel@ucmerced.edu

SRE 443

  • Surface Water Quality
  • Lake and Reservoir Management
  • Mercury Cycling in Aquatic Ecosystems
  • Natural Treatment Systems

Anita Bhappu

Anita Bhappu

Associate Professor

abhappu@ucmerced.edu

SSM 233

  • Digital platforms
  • Sharing economy
  • Service delivery
  • Diversity and teams
  • Organizational behavior

Stefano Carpin

  • Robotics
  • Motion planning
  • Cooperative multi-robot systems
  • Urban search and rescue & service robotics
  • High fidelity robot simulation
  • Artificial intelligence

Miguel Carreira-Perpinan

Professor Carreira-Perpiñán's basic research interests are in machine learning — the estimation of models and representations from data. Most recently, he has been working on topics in the intersection of optimization and machine learning, in particular in learning algorithms for deep neural nets and for nonlinear embeddings. Other topics of interest are dimensionality reduction/manifold learning, clustering, denoising and other unsupervised learning problems, and mean-shift algorithms. He often gets inspiration from problems in speech processing (e.g. articulatory inversion and model adaptation), computer vision (e.g. segmentation, articulated pose tracking, image registration), sensor networks, robotics (e.g. inverse kinematics) and other application areas. In the past, he has also worked on computational neuroscience, specifically on dimension reduction models of the maps of the visual cortex.

Spencer Castro Headshot

Spencer Castro

Assistant Professor

scastro39@ucmerced.edu

SSM 204B

Professor Castro is interested in the capacity of attention under cognitive workload, particularly in the context of technology and multitasking. He focuses on the validity of reaction time and accuracy as measures of different aspects of workload, as well as quantifying the risk of adverse outcomes due to these workload metrics in driving. He employs advanced cognitive modeling techniques to examine the mechanisms of attentional capacity, multitasking, and performance.

Alberto

Alberto Cerpa

Associate Professor and Graduate Program Chair (EECS)

acerpa@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2 221

Professor Cerpa's broad interests lie broadly in the computer networking and distributed systems areas. His recent focus has been systems research in wireless sensor networks, with emphasis in wireless radio channel measurement and modeling, link quality estimation, routing algorithms, topology control, and programming models. Professor Cerpa is also interested in Internet protocols and operating systems issues. In the past, he has been involved in active networking, mobile IP, and protocol design and verification research.

His research group develops and deploys sensor networks that address some of the grand challenges in science and engineering, mostly in the energy, health and instruments for scientific discovery domains. Some of his projects include developing instruments for solar radiation mapping, energy and occupancy monitoring in smart buildings and exercise physiology monitoring and modeling.

Santosh Chandrasekhar

Santosh Chandrasekhar

Assistant Teaching Professor

schandrasekhar@ucmerced.edu

SE2 273

  • Development of effective teaching strategies for undergraduate computer science courses
  • Development of a security education program for undergraduate students

YangQuan Chen

  • Mechatronics Control systems
  • Unmanned aircraft systems
  • Cyber-physical systems
  • Applied fractional calculus

Wei-Chun Chin

Professor Chin's studies have focused on the application of polymer physics, microfabrication and engineering principles to biological systems. The application of the theory and tools from engineering in his work has initiated many innovative and productive research projects. These studies have brought us a better understanding of natural phenomena from the unique perspective of engineering. Professor Chin's current research plans include:

  • Intracellular Ca2+ signaling in acute pancreatitis, cystic fibrosis, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
  • Applications of microfabrication techniques to study microenvironment effects on stem cell differentiation
  • Spontaneous polymer gel assembly in aqueous environment Intracellular and intercellular signaling in unicellular phytoplankton cells

Po-Ya Abel Chuang

Po-Ya Abel Chuang

Associate Professor

achuang5@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SRE 361

  • PEM fuel cell
  • Heat exchanger
  • Thermal management
  • Two-phase heat transfer and fluid flow
  • Loop heat pipe
  • Porous material 
  • Carbon fiber

Jeanette Cobian-Iñiguez

Jeanette Cobian-Iñiguez

Assistant Professor

jcobian3@ucmerced.edu

SRE 363

  • Heat transfer
  • Fluid Mechanics
  • Wildfires
  • Data Science
  • Science Communication

Martha Conklin

  • Surface water/groundwater interactions
  • Watershed hydrology
  • Forest management/water interactions
  • Natural tracers for water movement
  • Stakeholder engagement
  • K-12 environmental education

Francesco Danzi

Assistant Professor

fdanzi@ucmerced.edu

SRE 347

  • Structural Analysis and Optimization
  • Composite Structures
  • Energy Harvesting
  • Vibrations
  • Nonlinear Dynamics

Lilian P. Davila

Lilian Davila

Assistant Research Professor

ldavila@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

COB 386

  • The structure of materials
  • Nanostructures and nanomaterials for applications in technology and medicine
  • Biomaterials and environmental materials

Her research studies involve experimental and computational methods.

Gerardo Diaz

  • Energy conversion systems
  • Dynamic simulation and control of thermal systems
  • Adaptive thermal networks
  • Absorption chillers and heat pumps
  • Vapor compression systems with alternate refrigerants
  • Microchannel heat exchangers
  • Artificial neural networks and genetic algorithm for optimization of thermal components

Wan Du Portrait

Wan Du

Assistant Professor

wdu3@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2 208

  • Internet of Things (IoT)
  • Wireless Networking and Sensing
  • Edge Computing
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Data Analytics

Reza Ehsani

Reza Ehsani

Professor

rehsani@ucmerced.edu

SRE 331

  • Engineering systems for agriculture 
  • Automation and intelligent machines for production and postharvest of agricultural crops 
  • Precision agriculture technology 
  • Sensors for biotic and abiotic plant stress detection 
  • Mechanical harvesting machines and robotic systems for fruit and nut trees

Ariel L. Escobar

Ariel L. Escobar

Professor Emeritus

aescobar4@ucmerced.edu

SE1 340

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of human death all over the world. My laboratory have been focused in understanding molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in the development of cardiac arrhythmias during an increase in the heart rate (tachycardia) and after a cardiac infarction (ischemia).

Controlling the development of this cardiac arrhythmias will dramatically improve the rate of survival after a cardiac episode.

  • Bioelectricity
  • Physiological engineering
  • Molecular and cellular cardiology

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are endogenous small RNAs of 21–22 nucleotides with a significant role in gene regulation. They base-pair with the 3’UTR of a targeted mRNA whilst in association with Argonaute, the effector protein of the miRNA mediated silencing complex (miRISC), and causes translation repression and/or degradation. We are interested in understanding the fundamental properties of cell intrinsic miRNA and extracellular miRNA that are found in cell free body fluids and their contribution to viral infections, disease pathologies, disease diagnosis and treatment.

 Abbas Ghassemi

Abbas Ghassemi

Teaching Professor

aghassemi2@ucmerced.edu

SRE 372

  • Risk-based decision-making
  • Renewable energy (solar, wind and geothermal)
  • Bio-based fuels and water desalination
  • Carbon management and sequestration
  • Energy efficiency 
  • Pollution prevention, multiphase flow and process control

Rakesh Goel

Professor and Dean

SE2 315

  • Seismic safety of marine structures 
  • Seismic analysis of bridges in fault-rupture zones 
  • Use of supplemental damping to improve seismic behavior of structures 
  • Performance-based seismic engineering of buildings 
  • Earthquake analysis and design of plan-wise asymmetric buildings and bridges 
  • Base isolation and energy dissipation devices 
  • Experimental methods in structural dynamics 
  • Studies on nonlinear behavior of structures 

Arvind Gopinath

Arvind Gopinath

Associate Professor

agopinath@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2 384

  • Mechanics in biology
  • Biomechanics, Mechanobiology and signaling in Chlamydomonas cilia
  • Phototaxis in algae
  • Biofluids and Biothermodynamics
  • Multicellular motility and mechanics
  • Statistical physics of active systems
  • Biophysic

Sachin Goyal

Sachin Goyal

Associate Professor

sgoyal2@ucmerced.edu

SRE 329

  • Computational dynamics, mechanics and controls, with applications primarily in micro-scale biological systems
  • Continuum-dynamics- and multi-body-dynamics-based modeling, and inverse modeling, of DNA and proteins, and their interactions
  • Constitutive law modeling of bio-filaments from their molecular dynamics simulations

Alejandro Gutiérrez

Alejandro Gutiérrez

Assistant Teaching Professor

agutierrez78@ucmerced.edu

SRE 353

  • Engineering Education
  • Experiential Learning
  • Structural Mechanics
  • Computational Mechanics

Thomas C. Harmon

Thomas Harmon

Professor and Director of Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI)

tharmon@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SRE 435

  • Contaminant transport in aquatic systems
  • Soil and groundwater remediation
  • Development and use of environmental sensors

Hestir-Erin

Erin Hestir

Associate Professor

ehestir@ucmerced.edu

SRE 219

  • Water and food security/biodiversity/ecosystem services
  • Geospatial analytics
  • Hyperspectral and satellite remote sensing
  • Sensor networks in inland and coastal waters and wetlands

Hua Huang

Hua Huang

Assistant Professor

hhuang80@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2 275

  • Sensor Systems
  • Wireless Networks
  • Ubiquitous Computing
  • Smart Healthcare

Sungjin Im

Sungjin Im

Associate Professor

sim3@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2 214

  • Design and analysis of algorithms and their applications
  • Approximation algorithms
  • Online algorithms
  • Combinatorial optimization
  • Scheduling algorithms
  • Game theory

Jeffrey Jenkins

Jeffrey Jenkins

Assistant Professor

jjenkins8@ucmerced.edu

Social Sciences and Management 202B

  • Complex adaptive systems
  • Critical resource geography
  • Landscape values
  • Participatory mapping
  • Public lands and protected areas

Hyeran Jeon

Hyeran Jeon

Assistant Professor

hjeon7@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2 272

  • Computer Architecture and Systems Design
  • Emerging Workloads Acceleration
  • Smart Edge-base Systems Design
  • Energy-efficient Data Center Design

  • Applied economics in mountainous and semi-arctic ecosystems
  • Coupled natural and human systems
  • Sustainable resource management
  • Sense of place
  • Food security and food sovereignty
  • Biomass, bioenergy, and biochar

Safeeq Khan

Safeeq Khan

Associate Adjunct Professor

msafeeq@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SRE 411

  • Climate Change and Water Sustainability
  • Climate Change and Hydrologic Extremes
  • Watershed and Regional Scale Hydrologic Modeling
  • Water Resources Sensitivity and Scenario Analysis
  • Role of Vegetation Dynamics on Future Water Resources under Climate Change
  • Agriculture and Forest Management Options for Climate Change Adaptation and Sustainability
  • Application of Remote Sensing and LiDAR in Hydrologic Modeling and Natural Resources Evaluation and Management

Crystal A. Kolden Headshot

Professor Kolden's research focuses on characterizing and understanding wildfire intersections with the human-environment system through geospatial, temporal, and mixed-methods approaches.

Sarah Kurtz

Professor, Dept Chair (EE), and Graduate Program Chair (MBSE)

skurtz@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2 284

  • Understanding trends of growth of renewable energy and research issues that need to be tackled to support continued improvements
  • Identifying the latest research challenges as the solar industry is growing rapidly and addressing these through partnerships with companies
  • Understanding performance of PV systems and how the performance of the system and the grid it feeds into can be improved
  • Understanding and addressing reliability issues with PV systems

Angelo Kyrilov

Angelo Kyrilov

Assistant Teaching Professor

akyrilov@ucmerced.edu

CO1 370

Marcus Lee

Assistant Teaching Professor

mlee406@ucmerced.edu

SRE 313

  • Engineering Education

Min Hwan Lee

Min Hwan Lee

Associate Professor

mlee49@ucmerced.edu

SRE 349

  • Electrochemical energy conversion and storage (e.g., fuel cells and batteries)
  • Next generation non-volatile memory (e.g., resistive switching memory)
  • Electrochemical nano-patterning
  • Nanoscale electrochemistry
  • Nanoscale material interface and surface phenomena
  • Scanning probe microscopy based observations

Tea Lempiälä

Tea Lempiälä

Assistant Professor

tlempiala@ucmerced.edu

SSM 206A

  • Innovation and creativity
  • Collaboration and interaction in organizations
  • Sustainability and inclusion
  • Organization studies
  • Qualitative research

Valerie Leppert

Valerie Leppert

Professor and Department Chair (MSE)

vleppert@ucmerced.edu

SE2 293

  • Electron microscopy
  • Nanomaterials for application in technology and the environment

Changqing Li

  • Biomedical imaging instrumentation
  • Reconstruction algorithms
  • X-ray imaging
  • X-ray luminescence computed tomography (XLCT)
  • Fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT)

Dong Li

Dong Li

Associate Professor

dli35@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2 211

  • High performance computing
  • Fault tolerance/resilience in large-scale parallel and distributed systems
  • Power-aware computing
  • Performance modeling and optimization

Jennifer Lu

Jennifer Lu

Professor

jlu5@ucmerced.edu

(209) 228-4755

SE2 280

  • We integrate our proficiency in controlled inorganic nanomaterial synthesis, interface engineering, organic synthesis, and 3D printing within a unified framework. 
  • Our main goal is to create new material platforms that can change one type of energy or force into another effectively. This is important for batteries, fuel cells, and making chemicals with renewable energy. It's also crucial for applications like robots, sensors in biology, and artificial intelligence, among other uses.

Xiaoyi Lu

Xiaoyi Lu

Assistant Professor

xiaoyi.lu@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2 277

  • Parallel and Distributed Computing
  • Systems for HPC, Big Data, AI, and others
  • Virtualization and Cloud Computing
  • High-Performance Communication and I/O
  • Performance, Scalability, Fault tolerance, QoS, and others

Yanbao Ma

  • Mesoscale non-diffusive heat transfer
  • Mesoscale mass and energy transport in energy systems
  • Thermal management of electronics and energy systems
  • Environment-friendly water desalination systems

Paul Maglio

  • Service science
  • Human-computer interaction
  • Distributed cognition

Sam Markolf

Assistant Professor

smarkolf@ucmerced.edu

SRE 211

  • Sustainability and Resilience of Urban and Infrastructure Systems
  • Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation
  • Interconnected Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS)
  • Systems Thinking and Risk Analysis under Uncertainty

Ashlie Martini

Professor and Chair (ME)

amartini@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SRE 319

  • Tribology: Friction, wear and lubrication

Mark Matsumoto

Mark Matsumoto

Professor Emeritus and Past School of Engineering Dean

mmatsumoto@ucmerced.edu

  • Water and wastewater treatment, especially land-based treatment systems
  • Hazardous waste site remediation

Russ McBride

Russ McBride

Assistant Professor

rmcbride2@ucmerced.edu

SSM 202A

Entrepreneurship theory with elements of cognitive science and philosophy

Kara E. McCloskey

Tissue engineering is a sub/cross discipline that focuses on the design, development and maintenance of tissue products that are used for repairing, improving or restoring tissue function. This field is still in its infancy, and many problems and challenges exist that have yet to be overcome before safe, high-quality engineered tissue products are available in the marketplace. Therefore, my research focuses on:

  • Deriving and characterizing pure populations from stem cells in vitro
  • Comparing the function of such cells with mature cells derived in vivo
  • Using these cells towards regenerative medicine applications
  • Tissue engineering and cell therapy approaches
  • Cardiovascular cell lineage, but plan to expand into other cell systems long-term

  • Large scale hydro-economic modeling for water management and policy analysis
  • Water management for agricultural, environmental and urban uses
  • Agricultural production adaptation to drought and climate change
  • Sustainable agroecosystems for water and food security
  • Water informatics, consumptive water use in agriculture using remote sensing
  • Impact analysis using partial and general equilibrium models

Michael Modest

Michael Modest

Distinguished Professor Emeritus

mmodest@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SRE 335

  • Radiative heat transfer
  • Heat transfer in combustion
  • Heat transfer in hypersonic plasma

Victor Muñoz

  • Biophysics
  • Quantitative and synthetic biology
  • Protein folding, evolution and design
  • Protein engineering
  • Optical spectroscopy
  • Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy (NMR)
  • Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM)
  • Laser spectroscopy and ultrafast kinetics
  • Single molecule fluorescence
  • Statistical mechanics
  • Computational chemistry and biology

Colleen Naughton

Colleen Naughton

Assistant Professor

cnaughton2@ucmerced.edu

SRE 215

  • Food-Energy-Water Systems (FEWS)
  • Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA)
  • Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) in developing communities
  • Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
  • Integration of Anthropology and Engineering
  • Science Policy

Shawn Newsam

  • Image processing
  • Computer vision
  • Pattern recognition
  • Machine learning
  • Content-based information retrieval
  • Digital libraries, data mining and knowledge discovery in spatio-temporal, multimedia and scientific datasets

Elizabeth Nowadnick

  • Computational materials science
  • Complex oxide
  • Energy materials
  • Quantum materials

Tracey Osborne

Associate Professor and UC Presidential Chair

tosborne@ucmerced.edu

SSM 231

  • Political ecology
  • Climate change mitigation in tropical forests
  • Climate finance
  • Global environmental governance
  • Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge
  • Common property resource management
  • Climate justice
  • Nature-based solutions 
  • Climate communication, outreach and engagement
  • Regional expertise: Mexico and the Amazon (Ecuador, Peru, Guyana)

James Palko

James Palko

Associate Professor

Lab Site

SRE 355

Thermal and electrokinetic transport processes with applications in:

  • Thermal management
  • Energy storage
  • Water purification
  • Advanced manufacturing

Shijia Pan

Shijia Pan

Assistant Professor

span24@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2-274

  • Cyber-Physical Systems
  • Internet-of-Things
  • Ubiquitous Computing
  • Multimodal signal processing for IoT applications
  • Vibration/acoustic signal processing

  • Control theory for large-scale system design
  • Engaged classroom learning using interactive computational tools
  • AI and optimization methods for systems modeling

Tapan Pathak

Assistant Research Professor

tpathak@ucmerced.edu

SRE 429

  • Applied climate in agriculture

Alexander M. Petersen

  • Innovation
  • Careers
  • Complexity
  • Models of science

Thomas W. Peterson

  • Atmospheric aerosols

  • Control Systems
  • Automation
  • Robotic Vehicles
  • Power Conversion

Debora Lyn Porter

Assistant Professor

deboralynporter@ucmerced.edu

SRE 317

  • Characterization of Biological Materials
  • Biotemplating of Natural Materials
  • Creation of Advanced Materials Using Natural Components

Robert Rice

Robert Rice

Associate Teaching Professor

COB 365

  • Snow science
  • Mountain hydrology
  • Water resources
  • Sensor networks
  • Remote sensing
  • Climate change

Florin

Florin Rusu

Professor and Department Chair (CSE)

frusu@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2 210

  • Large scale data management
  • Database systems design and implementation
  • Data aggregation methods
  • Approximation and randomized algorithms

Mukesh Singhal

  • Cloud computing and Distributed Computing Systems.
  • Cybersecurity, Crypto currency, Blockchain, Consensus algorithms.
  • Intelligent systems, Distributed AI, Machine learning, optimization.
  • Wireless and Vehicular Networks, Ad-hoc Networks, Mobile Computing, Networks Security, IoT

Joel Spencer Portrait

Joel Spencer

Associate Professor and Graduate Program Chair (BioE)

joel.spencer@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2 381

Professor Spencer seeks to to develop novel optical imaging and sensing systems for applications in tissue regeneration, transplantation, and cancer. 

Current Research Topics:

  • investigating new ways to image the thymus in live mice with subcellular resolution
  • developing faster oxygen sensing methods for in vivo applications
  • applying whole tissue imaging methods for studying immune reconstitution
  • developing imaging assays for regenerative medicine and other applications

Pengfei Su

Assistant Professor

psu9@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

  • Programming Languages
  • Static and Dynamic Program Analysis
  • High-performance/Parallel Computing
  • Software Engineering

Anand Subramaniam

Anand Subramaniam

Associate Professor and Dept Chair (BioE)

asubramaniam@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

S&E2 Room 291

Professor Subramaniam seeks to understand the fundamental physicochemical mechanisms that govern the assembly and function of biomembranes. His lab group combines experimental tools from soft matter physics, chemistry, and molecular biology to tackle cutting-edge challenges in biomembrane engineering and bottom-up synthetic biology.  

 Current Research Topics:

  • developing methods for high throughput fabrication of semi-synthetic cells 
  • developing cost effective vesicle-based therapeutics and diagnostics to improve public health

Jian-Qiao Sun

  • Vibrations
  • Noise Control
  • Industrial Automation
  • Sensors
  • Actuators
  • Bio-Mechanics
  • Physical Rehabilitation

Meng Tang

Assistant Professor

mtang4@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2 279

  • computer vision
  • machine learning
  • discrete optimization
  • augmented and virtual reality

Samuel J. Traina

  • Chemical transformations of pollutants in soils, surface and ground water

Joshua Viers

Joshua Viers

Professor and Associate Dean of Research

jviers@ucmerced.edu

SRE 225

  • Agroecology and Conservation Agriculture Planning and Implementation
  • Climatic and Hydrological Change Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation Strategies
  • Ecosystem Service and Biodiversity Inventory, Assessment, and Restoration
  • Geospatial Technologies (Geographic Information Systems / Remote Sensing);
  • Informatics; Database Design and Data Mining
  • Water and Watershed Management; Water Footprinting

Christopher

  • Biomolecular materials (design of materials synthesis, assembly, processing and physical optimization strategies based on examples from nature)
  • Physical science and engineering of polymers and liquid crystals (structure-property-processing relationships)

Qian Wang

Assistant Professor

Side-Channel Attacks and Countermeasures

  1.    Exploration of vulnerabilities and defenses in side-channel attacks
  2.    Development of countermeasures against potential security threats
  3.    Investigation into the detection and prevention of hardware trojan attacks

Hardware-Intrinsic Security Primitives

  1. Study of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF)
  2. Research in Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC)
  3. Analysis of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)
  4. Number Theoretic Transforms (NTT)

Machine Learning Systems and Hardware Security

  1. Research on model attestation and fingerprinting techniques
  2. Integration of machine learning into trusted execution environments
  3. Cryptographic Implementation and Side-Channel Analysis

Examination of cryptographic algorithms for susceptibility to side-channel attacks

  1. Analysis of the implementation aspects for enhanced security
  2. Focus on Recent Advancements in Post-Quantum Cryptography

Yue Jessica Wang

Yue (Jessica) Wang

Assistant Professor

yuewang@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

SE2 283

  • 3D printable functional polymers
  • Biomimetic electronic materials
  • Organic structural metamaterials
  • Wearable and implantable (bio)electronics

LeRoy Westerling

LeRoy Westerling

Professor, Dept Chair (MCS), and Director, MM Graduate Program

lwesterling@ucmerced.edu

Lab Site

(209) 756-8793

SSM 232

  • Applied climatology
  • Climate-ecosystem-wildfire interactions
  • Statistical modeling for seasonal forecasts, paleofire reconstructions and climate-change impact assessments
  • Resource management and policy

Roland Winston

Roland Winston

Distinguished Professor Emeritus

rwinston@ucmerced.edu

  • Solar power and renewable energy
  • Elementary particle physics
  • Non-imaging optics

Ming-Hsuan Yang

  • Computer vision
  • Pattern recognition
  • Machine learning

Siddaiah Yarra

Siddaiah Yarra

Assistant Teaching Professor

syarra@ucmerced.edu

SE2 205

  • Pedagogic research
  • Forensic engineering education and dissemination
  • Recruitment, Retention and graduation of first generation and economically disadvantaged students
  • Advanced materials to improve sustainability and resilience of civil engineering constructed facilities
  • Structural health monitoring
  • Computational and analytical models to predict mechanical behavior of adaptive and advanced materials
  • Structural component and system-level testing

Lisa Yeo

Lisa Yeo

Assistant Professor

lyeo2@ucmerced.edu

SSM 204A

  • Economics of information systems
  • Security and privacy
  • Knowledge management
  • Decision support
  • Behavioral operations