College of Engineering Welcomes Five New Faculty
This fall, the UTSA College of Engineering welcomes five new faculty members to its staff who bring a wealth of academic, research and industry experiences to the college.
Kiran Bhaganagar, Ph.D., joins the faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Before coming to UTSA, Bhaganagar was an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maine and an assistant research scientist at the University of Michigan.
Bhaganagar’s research areas include fluid mechanics and turbulent flows and applications in coastal, atmospheric flows and physiological flows, such as coronary flow. With the use of supercomputers, Bhaganagar solves complicated and turbulent flow problems.
Attracted to its vibrant research, Bhaganagar joins UTSA with several goals, one of which is to be a leading researcher in the field of computational turbulence.
JingYong Ye, Ph.D., joins the faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Before coming to UTSA, Ye was an Associate Research Scientist at the University of Michigan where he was honored with the Outstanding Research Scientist Award in 2007.
Ye brings extensive research experience to the college covering a wide range of areas in biophotonics and nanobiotechnology, and has been in charge of several National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded research programs. He is a senior member of IEEE, and serves as a reviewer for funding agencies including NIH, the National Science Foundation and the Petroleum Research Fund. Ye’s innovative research has led to nine patents.
At UTSA, Ye plans to continue his creative research and contribute to making the university one of the nation’s leading research-intensive institutions. Additionally, Ye hopes to “develop a number of cutting-edge technologies to address critical issues at the frontier of biomedical research and life science, thus improving quality of life and human well-being.”
Hariharan Krishnaswami, Ph.D., joins the faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Krishnaswami, who has a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota, was a senior design engineer at GE Healthcare in Bangalore, India before entering academics.
Opportunities to contribute through research and teaching to UTSA’s goal of becoming a premier public research university are what attracted Krishnaswami to the institution. His research areas include power electronic converter and control technologies for renewable energy integration, power conversion efficiency improvement through innovative power converter topologies, and power electronic applications to power systems and future smart electric grid.
One of Krishnaswami’s goals that will contribute to making UTSA a premier public research university is establishing a power electronic research group to work on current converter and control technologies with varied applications, including renewable energy. “I hope to bring to the program a power and energy systems focus by performing high quality research in this area while educating future engineers to meet the increasing demand of electrical energy workforce,” said Krishnaswami
Byeong Lee, Ph.D., joins the faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. After earning his doctoral degree in computer engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, Lee spent five years as a design engineer at Texas Instruments and ten years on the senior research staff of the Agency for Defense Development.
Lee’s research areas consist of computer architecture, low power design, application-specific embedded systems, workload characterization of emerging applications, parallel computing and parallel architecture design, performance modeling, and early-stage power estimation.
With 15 years of industry experience, Lee is intent on bringing that expertise to his classroom and research labs. “I want the students to have a professional engineering mind, which is different from the scientific one,” Lee said..
Ruoting Pei, Ph.D., joins the faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Prior to coming to UTSA, Pei was a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University.
Pei’s research areas focus on the applied environmental microbiology, antibiotic resistance, microbial indicator, molecular microbial ecology, biological remediation, and environmental toxicology.
A dynamic and supportive research environment is what attracted Pei to UTSA where she looks to accomplish many goals. One such goal is to widen the breadth of the civil and environmental engineering department. “I want to bring environmental biotechnology into the program, and establish cutting-edge research in environmental engineering, bioremediation and applied engineering approaches to solve environmental problems,” said Pei.
