Meet the New Berkeley EE Faculty

Two new professors are joining the Electrical Engineering faculty in 2019.

Boubacar Kanté

Associate Prof. Boubacar Kanté joined the EECS department in January 2019. He had been an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California San Diego. His multidisciplinary research interests are in the areas of wave-matter interaction, from microwave to optics and related fields such as nanophotonics, nanoscale photon management, and biophysics. Grounded on the fundamental physical principles, and the on-demand dimensionality of materials and nanomaterials, his research addresses tantalizing experimental and theoretical physical questions in the field of nano-optics and intelligent nano-materials to address global energy, defense, and health questions. He is particularly interested in the theoretical modeling, fabrication and characterization of metamaterials for application in information science. Kanté’s recent research has focused on artificial electromagnetic composites — metamaterials. He demonstrated the first non-magnetic metamaterial invisibility cloak, introduced the notion of index for a meta-surface, and, the notion of symmetry/parity of ring resonators. Kanté also demonstrated, from symmetry consideration, that closed rings, previously believed incapable of producing artificial magnetism, can make ultra-broadband negative index. He received his Ph.D in Physics from “Universite Paris Sud” (Orsay-France) and was subsequently postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Berkeley from 2010 to 2013.

Sophia Shao

Assistant Prof. Sophia Shao will be joining the EECS department on July 1, 2019. She received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University, China, and her S.M. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Architecture, Circuits, and Compilers Group at Harvard, where she worked with David Brooks and Gu-Yeon Wei. She has most recently been working as a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research. Her interests are in the area of computer architecture, with a special focus on specialized accelerator, heterogeneous architecture, and agile VLSI design methodology. She was a Siebel Scholar and an invited participant at the Rising Stars in EECS Workshop, and her work was selected as one of the TopPicks in Computer Architecture in 2015.