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UC department of electrical engineering and computer science welcomes new faculty

headshot of Diana Riggs By Diana Riggs
8 minute read October 9, 2018

The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at University of Cincinnati welcomes several new faculty members this fall.

Fred Chiou, Ph.D., joined the department as an associate professor-educator in January 2018. His research interests include the integration of renewable energy and microgrid distributed power systems, solar PV systems for sustainability, solar charging stations for electric vehicles, embedded systems, digital circuits and industrial automation.

He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees (both in electrical engineering) from Georgia Institute of Technology, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Taiwan University of Science and Technology.

Before joining UC, Chiou was an associate professor and the program coordinator of the electronics engineering technology program in the department of engineering technology at Weber State University in Utah from 2013 to 2017.

Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Chiou was twice awarded (summers of 2016 and 2017) the Visiting Faculty Program to participate in a research project on renewable energy and microgrid power systems at Idaho National Laboratory.

He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). In addition to his academic teaching experience, Chiou has more than 20 years’ work experience as a senior design engineer, in the industries of computer hardware engineering and telecommunications.

Jayanta Debnath, Ph.D., joins EECS as an assistant professor-educator. He is primarily interested in the power systems field.

He received his Ph.D. (electrical and computer engineering) from the University of Manitoba. He also earned a M.Sc. in electrical and electronic engineering and a B.Sc in electrical and electronic engineering from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET).

Before joining University of Cincinnati, Debnath worked as a Mitacs Elevate postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Manitoba. He also worked as a part-time instructor for three years with the International College of Manitoba (ICM), at the University of Manitoba, where all students in the class were from various countries around the world. He found it rewarding to work with such an inclusive, multi-cultural group.

Debnath also previously worked with Manitoba Hydro International (MHI) as an engineering assistant. He also worked as a lecturer in electrical and electronic engineering department of the American International University Bangladesh (AIUB) for over 4 years.

During his graduate study at the University of Manitoba, he worked as a teaching assistant for various courses and was involved as a research assistant. He also worked as a graduate student member of the Senate Committee on Appeal at University of Manitoba. He worked with the Institute of Bio-diagnostic as a research assistant. He received several awards and fellowship during his graduate and undergraduate study. He is an active member of IEEE, and involved as a reviewer for a number of conferences and journals (IEEE) in the area.

Mehdi Norouzi, PhD, received B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Tehran. Working as EMC engineer in biomedical industry, he joined the Amirkabir Institute of Technology for pursuing his M.S. in electrical engineering - microwave. Mehdi worked as senior software developer at Zigorat Technology for more than three years before joining UC.

He received his Ph.D. from UC in 2015 and since then, he worked as research associate developing structural health monitoring systems for the Ohio Department of Transportation. He co-authored multiple research proposals and papers, and taught multiple courses in the department of biomedical engineering as well as electrical engineering (including signal and systems, controls, circuits, network (TCP/IP), Python and probability).

In his new role as an assistant professor–educator, Norouzi is part of a research group developing common operating platform for employing drones or unmanned automated vehicles in infrastructure assessment and traffic monitoring. The platform would allow users to stream video real-time during a mission, share data amongst off-site and on-site staff, and post process data using a centralized database. Using the platform front-end, users can review the processed data and interact with a 3-D point cloud rendering system by using a computer or virtual reality goggles.

As a certified reliability engineer (CRE), his main focus is to design and develop reliable and scalable databases, efficient implementation of processing algorithms at the database layer and/or apply large scale machine learning algorithms on distributed environments using Hadoop, spark, etc. 

Dana Simian, PhD, will join the department as a visiting assistant professor. Her research interests include, but are not limited to: machine learning, artificial intelligence, modeling and optimization, theory of algorithms, theory of computation, computational geometry, numerical calculus and applied mathematics.

She graduated with distinction the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering from Sibiu, Romania and the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics from Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She received her Ph.D. degree from Babeș-Bolyai University from Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Dana comes to UC from the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania, where she is a professor in the department of mathematics and information from the Faculty of Sciences, and director of the Research Center in informatics and information technology. She has directed and participated in many research projects and is author of more than 80 scientific articles and 10 books. She performed teaching and/or research activities in universities from Germany, Ireland, Poland, Serbia and Bulgaria. She was invited as plenary speaker at 19 international conferences and was editor of proceedings at many international conferences.

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Joni Torsella, PhD worked for the EPA and UC mathematics in the past. Photo/UC Creative Services.

Joni Torsella, Ph.D., will join the department as associate professor. Her interests include active learning and flipped classrooms. She received her Ph.D. from the Medical University of South Carolina and her B.S. degree from Wilkes University.

Torsella comes to EECS from UC’s Department of Engineering Education, where she had been associate professor since 2008. Prior to that, she was associate professor in the former College of Applied Science at UC. She began her career at UC in 2000 in mathematics and statistics.

She enjoys teaching first-year engineering students and employing active learning strategies in her classroom. She has been the recipient of the Master Educator Award for several years at CEAS and recently received the Neil Wandmacher Award for teaching excellence in spring 2018.

In an effort to improve communication between the math department in UC's College of Arts and Sciences and CEAS, she began teaching Calculus I and II for engineering majors. She was part of a team of professors who used a flipped classroom model to teach calculus.

Prior to her initial appointment at the university, she worked as a statistician at the Environmental Protection Agency in Cincinnati and at Wyeth Ayerst Laboratories in Philadelphia.

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