Six new EECS faculty welcomed in 2018

The EECS department welcomes six new faculty members who joined the department in 2018:  CS Prof. Shafi Goldwasser (EECS M.S. ’81/Ph.D. ’84) is a cryptography pioneer and one of only three women to have won the ACM A.M. Turing Award. Goldwasser was a professor in the Department of EECS at MIT and joined us to become the new director of the Simons Institute; EE Assistant Prof. Jiantao Jiao‘s research on causal relationships has applications in the fields of health and social sciences. Jiao is expecting his Ph.D. in EE from Stanford University this fall; CS Prof. Jennifer Listgarten applies machine learning to computational biology and gene editing, including CRISPR technology. She came to us from Microsoft Research New England; EE Prof.-in-residence Yi Ma (EECS M.S. ’97/Ph.D. ’00) applies mathematical analysis to applications in computer vision and autonomous robots. He comes to us from ShanghaiTech University, where he was professor and executive dean of the School of Information Science and Technology; EE Associate Prof. Robert Pilawa-Podgurski’s research interests include renewable energy applications and power electronics. He comes to us from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was an associate professor of ECE; EE Assistant Teaching Prof. Gireeja Ranade (EECS M.S. ’09/Ph.D. ’14) has research interests that span various aspects of artificial intelligence (AI), wireless communications and robotics. She comes to us from Microsoft Research, where she was a postdoctoral researcher in AI.