Engineering faculty awarded professorships

Carnegie Mellon University has awarded professorships to five exceptional faculty members in the College of Engineering this April. They will be honored in a formal ceremony later in the year. Congratulations to all five of the following recipients.

Amir Barati Farimani

Russell V. Trader Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Barati Farimani is one of the top researchers in AI engineering, integrating the fundamentals and applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning into the engineering discipline. His efforts to harness the power of AI in accelerating the discovery of novel materials have set new standards in the field, having the potential to revolutionize how we design and engineer materials.

Chris McComb

Gerard G. Elia Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering

McComb’s research interests include human social systems in design and engineering; machine learning for engineering design; human-AI collaboration and teaming; and STEM education. He is the director of the new Human+AI Design Initiative that researches, develops, and assesses AI agents that collaborate with humans both as individuals and through teams; applying those AI agents to previously-unsolved problems in engineering and design; and preparing the next generation of AI engineering practitioners and researchers through teaching and training efforts.

Tagbo Niepa

Arthur Hamerschlag Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering

Niepa’s research contributions are in three areas. The first area targets drug-resistant pathogens and offer an alternative to antibiotics by using physical chemical factors to create new surfaces that could be activated to eradicate microbes and kill pathogens. The second area focuses on interfacial biofilms, particularly fluid interfaces where biofilms form, and investigates how interfacial phenomena activate bacteria to generate new materials. The third area aims to replicate the human microbiome by encapsulating microbes.

Soummya Kar

Buhl Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Kar’s research interests include decision-making in large-scale networked systems, stochastic systems, multi-agent systems and data science, with applications in cyber-physical systems and smart energy systems. Kar is a Fellow of the IEEE, and, among other honors, with former ECE Ph.D. student Sérgio Pequito and University of Pennsylvania Professor George J. Pappas won the 2016 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award from the American Automatic Control Council in the Theory Category.

Bryan Parno

Kavčić-Moura Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Parno’s research is primarily focused on investigating long-term, fundamental improvements in how to design and build secure systems. He formalized and worked to optimize verifiable computation, receiving a Best Paper Award (and later a Test-of-Time Award) at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy for his advances. He co-authored the book Bootstrapping Trust in Modern Computers, and his work in that area has been incorporated into the latest security enhancements in Intel CPUs.

Pictured above from left to right: Amir Barati Farimani, Bryan Parno, Soummya Kar, Chris McComb, Tagbo Niepa.