Research-Related Faculty

Primary research interests are related to the development, performance assessment, and implementation of innovative materials to civil infrastructure. In particular, recent research emphasis is on: (i) development of tailored structural materials, components and systems, (ii) solid and structural mechanics for multi-scale applications, (iii) computational design optimization of materials and structures, (iv) large-scale testing, (v) low-cost and innovative manufacturing of tailored materials and structures; (vi) soft-computing methods for structural integrity assessment; (vii) innovative experimental and measurement techniques; (viii) earthquake engineering; and (ix) bridge design.

Laura Dillon received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts in 1984. She spent thirteen years in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before joining the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at Michigan State University in 1997. She served as the CSE Department Chair from 2003-2007. Professor Dillon's research interests center on specification and analysis of concurrent software systems, formal methods in software engineering, and programming languages.

Rich Enbody came to MSU in 1987 with a Ph.D. from the U. of Minnesota. Before graduate school he taught high school mathematics for six years. His B.A. was in Mathematics from Carleton College. His work at MSU has covered a variety of topics with many related to computer architecture such as parallel processing, caching, power and security. He holds two patents in nanotechnology devices with two more pending in security hardware.

Leo Kempel's current research interests are conformal antennas, engineered materials for microwave applications, and computational electromagnetics. Kempel is a Member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, and Commission B of the International Scientific Radio Union (URSI). He received the MSU College of Engineering's Withrow Distinguished Scholar (Junior Faculty) Award in 2001, the MSU Teacher-Scholar award in 2002, and a CAREER award by the National Science Foundation in 2002.

Dr. Kodur's research has focused on the experimental behavior and analytical modeling of structural systems under extreme fire conditions, constitutive modelling of material properties at elevated temperatures, developing guidelines for fire resistance design of structural systems, evaluating fire performance of high performing materials, performance based fire safety design, non-linear design and analysis of structures and building collapse investigations.

Dr. Kutay's background and interests are primarily on experimental and numerical investigation of fundamental material behavior of asphalt pavements and granular materials. His research focuses on improvement of the AASHTO Superpave mix design, understanding and better prediction of fatigue cracking in asphalt pavements using state-of-the-art techniques such as the Viscoelastic Continuum Damage (VECD) Theory and development of tools to improve understanding of permanent deformation (rutting) characteristics of asphalt pavements. His other research interests include pavement surface characteristics such as smoothness, tire/pavement noise and splash/spray.

Prof. Li's research interests lie in wireless security, cognitive networks, wireless sensor networks, cyber-physical systems, wireless communications, digital signal processing, and information theory. Current projects in Prof. Li's BAWC (Broadband Access and Wireless Communication) Lab include: highly efficient and reliable communication system design, multi-layer techniques for secure communications under hostile environments, secure cyber-physical communication systems, and security issues in cognitive networks.

Dr. Lyles is generally interested in highway safety issues. More specific topics include: work zone safety, the effectiveness of traffic control devices, safety and mobility of older persons, and surrogate measures of accident exposure.

Dr. Mason research utilizes mixed-signal integrated circuits and microfabrication to addresses challenges in microsystem development for biochemical, neural, and environmental sensing applications. Current projects include high-resolution, low-power, bioelectrochemical interrogation circuits; adaptive chemical sensor interface circuits; post-CMOS fabrication of electrochemical sensor arrays; and implantable mixed-signal integrated circuits for signal processing of wireless neural recordings. Dr. Mason is a Senior Member of the IEEE, an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems (TBCAS), and a General Chair of the 2011 IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference. He teaches courses in the area of microelectronics and biomedical engineering, including VLSI design, microprocessor systems, and biomedical instrumentation.

Joydeep Mitra joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an Associate Professor. Prior to this appointment he held academic positions at New Mexico State University and North Dakota State University, and was a senior consulting engineer with LCG Consulting, Los Altos, Calif. He acquired his PhD in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, and his bachelor's degree, also in electrical engineering, from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. His research interests include power system reliability and security, and distributed and renewable energy resource planning. He has received research support from electric utilities, Sandia National Laboratories, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER Award. He is a senior member of the IEEE and contributes to the Power and Energy Society, the Industrial Applications Society, and the Standards Association.

Antennas, scattering, radar target identification, measurement of the electromagnetic properties of materials, electromagnetic theory.

Dr. Pang-Ning Tan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at MSU. He received his M.S degree in Physics and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Minnesota. His research interests span a broad range of data mining problems, from pattern discovery (association analysis, anomaly detection, and cluster analysis) to predictive modeling. In addition to addressing fundamental problems in data mining, he is also interested in applying data mining techniques to various application domains including climate and Earth sciences, social and information networks, botnet and webspam detection, and medical informatics. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Army Research Office, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Michigan State University.

Satish Udpa's research interests span the broad area of materials characterization and nondestructive evaluation (NDE). Work done by him to date in the area includes an extensive repertoire of forward models for simulating physical processes underlying several inspection techniques. Coupled with careful experimental work, such forward models can be used for designing new sensors, optimizing test conditions, estimating the probability of detection, assessing designs for inspectability and training inverse models for characterizing defects.

• Mathematical molecular biosciences; Mathematical biophysics; Variational multiscale models; Ion channel transport; Proton transport; PDE modeling of biomolecular surfaces; Virus capsid modeling.
• Bioimaging; Geometric flow approaches to images and surfaces; PDE transform; Image edge analysis by coupled PDEs; Bioluminescence tomography.
• High order interface methods; Matched interface and boundary (MIB); Multidomain interface problems.
• Modeling and computation of nano-electronic devices; Nanofluidic systems; Nano-bio sensors.
• Quantum kinetic theory; Transport theory; Quantum Boltzmann equation.
• Wavelet and local spectral methods for PDEs; Computational electromagnetics; Computational fluid dynamics; Richtmyer-Meshkov instability; Structural analysis.
• Dynamical systems; Controlling chaos ; Controlling turbulence; Controlling pattern formation.

His current research interests are in SPICE macromodeling of analog ICs, symbolic circuit analysis and audio engineering. Dr. Wierzba is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, Phi Kappa Phi, and Sigma Xi. He was the recipient of the 1986 Myril B. Reed Best Paper Award of the Midwest Symposium on Circuit and Systems.

Measuring multi-axial thermophysical properties of elastomers and biological soft tissues that are subjected to finite multi-axial deformation; thermomechanically-induced damage to proteins, cells, and tissues. Biomedical; polymer; nonlinear mechanics.

Li Xiao received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in 2002. She is a member of the Experimental Laboratory for Advanced Networking and Systems. Her research interests include distributed and networking systems, overlay systems and applications, wireless sensor networks, wireless mesh networks, system resource management, and design and implementations of experimental algorithms.