CU Engineering welcomes prominent new faculty across disciplines

Caroline Harrah — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 18:16:45 +0000

CU Engineering welcomes prominent new faculty across disciplines Caroline Harrah Thu, 09/11/2025 - 12:16

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� College of Engineering and Applied Science welcomes a cohort of scholars whose work spans imaging and sustainable energy, resilient infrastructure and the cryosphere, advanced manufacturing and inclusive pedagogy, as well as artificial intelligence, robotics and high-performance computing.

Their appointments enhance the college’s research breadth and depth, while expanding opportunities for students across engineering disciplines. See full list below.

Electrical, Computer & Energy Engineering

Professor Al Bovik

We welcome Professor Al Bovik, a leader in image/video engineering and visual perception whose work has shaped how digital pictures are captured, processed and evaluated at scale.

He joins Assistant Professor Yide Zhang, whose lab develops optical and quantum imaging techniques, ranging from fluorescence lifetime to photoacoustic and ultrafast modalities, to observe biological structure and function in real time.

Two accomplished educators round out the group: Associate Teaching Professor Tina Smilkstein, with expertise in integrated circuit design and medical technologies, and Assistant Teaching Professor Erik Hodges, a radar remote-sensing specialist with experience on NASA’s CYGNSS Science Team who will also contribute to capstone instruction.

Civil, Environmental & Architectural Engineering

Assistant Professor Zhi Li integrates hydrology, AI and satellite remote sensing to advance flood prediction and communication, including work toward a global “flood foundation model” that translates forecasts into usable, community-specific guidance.

Assistant Professor Laura Sunberg studies environmental fluid mechanics with an emphasis on particle transport, including microplastics and wildfire firebrands and links fundamental transport processes to applications in coastal, watershed, and wildfire environments.

Paul M. Rady Mechanical Engineering

Five new faculty members broaden our mechanical engineering research and teaching portfolio. Assistant Professor Jun Li combines responsive biomaterials with advanced manufacturing to create wearable and implantable devices that promote health and sustainability. Assistant Professor Max Saccone develops additive and conversion-based pathways to fabricate microscale metals, ceramics and carbon with tunable structure–property relationships.

Three educators deepen the department’s student-centered mission: Assistant Teaching Professor Katherine Ramos (inclusive pedagogy, objectives-based grading), Assistant Teaching Professor Leila Saleh (biomaterials, immunology and ethics in engineering education), and Assistant Teaching Professor Kelsey Scalaro (engineering identity and longitudinal student success, informed by industry experience).

Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences

Associate Professor Alia Khan joins Smead Aerospace and ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Environmental Engineering Program. Her research combines environmental chemistry with optical remote sensing, utilizing uncrewed aerial vehicles and satellites to quantify snow and ice melt across mountain and polar regions. Her portfolio includes NASA- and NSF-funded projects, including a 2021 NSF CAREER award on Antarctic snow darkening and a new NASA effort focused on Greenland’s dark ice zones.

Other faculty joining us in Fall 2025 include:

Eric Peterson, Scholar in Residence, Civil, Environmental & Architectural Engineering
Melissa Mahoney, Teaching Professor, Chemical and Biological Engineering
Chantal Iribigaza, Assistant Teaching Professor, Integrated Design Engineering Program
James Long, Assistant Teaching Professor, Biomedical Engineering Program
Amy Moore, Scholar in Residence, Engineering Management Program
Todd Mosher, Scholar in Residence, Engineering Management Program
Madhur Atreya, Assistant Teaching Professor, Integrated Design Engineering Program

Computer Science

We welcome five scholars whose work spans language, autonomy, scientific software, neurosymbolic AI and large-scale systems. Assistant Professor Maria Antoniak advances natural language processing, cultural analytics and health applications. Assistant Professor Alvaro Velasquez brings leadership experience from DARPA and research in neurosymbolic AI and autonomy. Assistant Professor Mark Zhao builds systems for training and deploying large ML models with emphasis on scalability, efficiency and security.

New research-focused faculty include Assistant Research Professor Saber Jafarpour, who studies learning and safe control for robotics and multi-agent cyber-physical systems, and Assistant Research Professor Jeremy Thompson, who develops open-source, high-performance scientific software (including Ratel and libCEED) to accelerate simulation at scale.

These appointments illustrate the scope and ambition of engineering at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��. From the molecular to the planetary scale, and from pedagogy to practice, the incoming faculty bring methods and perspectives that not only extend existing research areas but also open new ones. Their presence broadens the problems the college can address, the tools it can apply and the ways students will learn to think as engineers and scientists.

CU Engineering is welcoming a new cohort of faculty whose research spans advanced imaging, sustainable energy systems, resilient infrastructure, robotics and more. Their appointments strengthen the college’s breadth in both research and teaching, while expanding opportunities for students across engineering disciplines.

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