2022 COE Graduate Research Poster Presentation Competition

Dr. Hiba Ahmed received her Bachelor of Science degree B.Sc. (Honor) in architecture engineering and Environmental planning from Sharg El Nile College in Sudan. She obtained her M.S. in Civil Engineering and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T).  She is an Adjunct faculty member in the department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering (CAEE). Her research work during the last 15 years was in the area of structural composite material especially in polymer nanofibers interleaving and approaches to improve the toughness of carbon/epoxy composite laminate.

Andrea Angiuli is a Research Scientist in the Prime Machine Learning team at Amazon. Prior to joining Amazon, he received MS in Applied Mathematics with emphasis in Financial Mathematics from the University of Milan, Italy, and MA and PhD from the Statistics and Applied Probability at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). During his PhD, he worked on solving games with infinity population of agents using reinforcement learning and its applications to Finance. He was a graduate researcher at the International Center of Mathematical Research in Marseille, France in 2017 and a team leader for the Financial Mathematic Team Challenge at Fundação Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro in 2018 and 2019. In 2021, he was a Chief Technology Officer intern at Bloomberg, New York working on path dependent volatility models for pricing VIX options.

Dr. Arvind Chandrasekaran, Assistant Professor in the department of   Bioengineering, is a licensed Professional Engineer and is the Principal Investigator at the Bioinspired Microengineering (BIOME) Laboratory at NC A&T. His current research interests include Microfluidics, Biomimetics, and Tissue Engineering, applied towards Neutrophils Immunotherapeutics. He is currently teaching the courses BioMEMS and Microfluidics, Biotechnology Entrepreneurship and Biophysics Design Lab.

Dr. Mookesh Dhanasar is trained in Mechanical Engineering, Applied Physics and Mathematics. His research areas include high-speed aircraft geometry, Hypersonic propulsion engine systems design, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), small satellites (CubeSat’s) power and propulsion systems and nuclear in-space propulsion systems design. Dr. Dhanasar has taught a variety of STEM courses and mentored both undergraduate and graduate students

Gregory Duperon is a field applications engineer at Texas Instruments, supporting Aerospace & Defense and Test & Measurement customers. Gregory’s previous experience also includes roles in product/test engineering and product quality. A native of Atlanta, GA, Gregory completed undergraduate and graduate studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Dr.  Svitlana Fialkova is the research scientist at ERC-RMB at NC A&T State University. She obtained her M.S. in chemistry from Karazin Kharkiv National University (Ukraine) and worked for 10 years in Quality Assurance, from product specification engineer to QA manager. Pursuing her real passion – science, she came back to school and earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from NC A&T State University.  She has published several peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, and has been co-inventor on two patents.  Her research activities focused on: nano-scale materials characterization including lightweight alloys, polymers and biomaterials; ceramic materials and coatings development and characterization for dental applications; new catalyst development for synthesis of carbon nano materials; and development of in-situ corrosion evaluation technique at micro- and nano- scale

Hamid Ghanei is an Expert Product Development Engineer at Tempur Sealy International and holds 4 patents.  He earned a Bachelor and Master Degree in Mechanical Engineering with focus in the area of Thermal Engineering.  He also holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Production and Operation Management and a Master of Business Administration. He is also a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt.

Amol Gulve is an Engineering Manager at Volvo Group Trucks Technology, with over 15 years of experience working in Automotive and Heavy duty truck industry and has developing some exciting products in the field of Cab, Chassis & Vehicle Dynamics. He has been recognized for his collaborative and cross-functional leadership style. Amol is originally from Mumbai India and has Masters in Mechanical Engineering from University of Detroit Mercy.

Dr. Islam is an investigational and experimental computer scientist in the field of data mining, machine learning, and computational biology, who likes to contrive novel real-world problems with practical solutions through interdisciplinary collaborations that can affect the existing world and paves the way for future progression. His research interests include the design and implementation of machine learning algorithms for biomedical image processing, genome expression analysis, association study, and cybersecurity.

Dr. Jha is an associate professor with teaching and research specialization in water resources engineering. He has over 15 years of experience working in multi-scale modeling of hydrology and water resources/quality for evaluating water management strategies and impact assessment studies due to urban and agriculture best management practices, land use change and climate variability.

Dr.Kale is an High Performance Computing Admin in the Computational Data Science and Engineering department. His current research interests include Recommender system, Ranking in Recommender Systems, HPC log data anomaly detection, Edge Computing, Neural Collaborative Filtering and Natural Language Processing. He is currently associated as an administrator for Visualization and Computation Advancing Research (Vicar) Center resources and advise students and faculties to run their programs/simulations on ViCAR resources.

Dr. Abebe Kebede is an Associate Professor of Physics at N CA&T State University with over 30 years of teaching and research experience. His research mainly focuses on electronic and magnetic properties of transition metal oxides, heavy fermion systems and Kondo insulators. His main teaching goals include student engagement that result in a rewarding and fulfilling educational experience at major research institutions and national laboratories. He is a life member of the American Physical society and founder of Educators Without Border Inc. 

Dr. Dhananjay Kumar, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at North Carolina A&T, is well recognized for his research and teaching in the areas of thin films and nanomaterials. He has published more than 125 papers in peer- reviewed journals with more a few thousand citations. He has sponsored research of more than 25 graduate students and 4 postdoctoral fellows at North Carolina A&T.

Byron Lambert is a Sr. Associate Research Fellow in Sterilization Science at Abbott. Is the founder of Abbott’s Assurance of Sterility Task Force. He has provided sterilization leadership within Quality, Operations and R&D.  His management responsibilities have included teams in microbiology, chemistry, calibration, packaging engineering, reliability engineering and pre-clinical research and biocompatibility.  His sterilization responsibilities focus on developing innovative terminal sterilization solutions for sensitive combination devices. Byron recently co-edited, Assurance of Sterility for Sensitive Combination Products and Materials, New Paradigms to Bring Innovative Healthcare Products to Patients (Elsevier/Academic Press, 2020).  He is a Director of the International Irradiation Association (IIA) and convener of ISO TC198 WG2, Radiation Sterilization.  His graduate work was in Chemical Engineering, radiation and polymer science.

Dr. Zhichao Li obtained his Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering from Kansas State University in 2006. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of the Industrial & Systems Engineering Department of NCA&T, where he is conducting research focused on modeling, simulation and optimization of advanced manufacturing processes.

Dr. Mahmoud Nabil Mahmoud is an Assistant Professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina A & T University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Tennessee Tech University, Cookeville, Tennessee. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees with honors in Computer Engineering from Cairo University, Egypt. Dr. Mahmoud’s research interests include security and privacy in smart grid, machine learning.

Gabriel Martinez obtained a M.S. and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and joined Amazon shortly after graduating in 2020. He has been working with a talented and diverse group of fellow economists, engineers, data scientist, linguists, and financial experts.

Jose A. Matute is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering at the North Carolina A&T State University. His research interests include modeling and control of autonomous vehicles under faulty and normal conditions. He has a Ph.D. in Control Engineering from the University of the Basque Country, Spain.

Dr. Ahmed Cherif Megri, holds a Ph.D. degree from INSA at Lyon (France) in the area of Thermal Engineering and an ”Accreditation for Supervising Research" called Habilitation (HDR) degree from Pierre and Marie Curie University - Paris VI, Sorbonne Universities (2011). Areas of Interests (projects funded by DOE, DOD, EPA, and ASHRAE), include Integration Zonal Models/Building Energy Simulation Models, Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD), Data Mining and Machine Learning: Support Vector Machine tools, and 3D-printing and Advanced Manufacturing.

Dr. Rina Mudanyi is a Thermal Process Engineer at Corning Inc. where she provides process and materials engineering support to improve glass melting for new and existing products across different Corning divisions from life sciences to display technologies. Her work touches on all aspects of glass life from research and development to manufacturing and even afterlife through analysis of glass interactions with the different melting systems.Dr. Mudanyi got both her PhD in Mechanical Engineering and BS in Chemical Engineering from North Carolina A&T.

Rohith Nama is a proud Aggie Amazonian who is currently working as a Senior Software Development Engineer at Amazon Prime Tech. His work is closely associated with prime member dynamic journey management and customer acquisition domains. Rohith joined Amazon in July 2020 as a Software Development Engineer. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked at Capital One as a Sr. Data Science Engineer and at a startup as a Data Engineer. Rohith earned his B.Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering and M.S. in Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University(NCAT) in 2016. Rohith also serves as an NCAT ambassador who is responsible for driving collaboration between A&T College of Engineering and Amazon. He is passionate about Entrepreneurship and advocates for DEI (Diversity, Equality, Inclusion) in Tech.

Abdullah Al Redwan Newaz is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at North Carolina A&T State University. Before that, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Rice University, Houston, TX, USA, and Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan, in 2018-2020, 2017-2018, respectively. He earned Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Information Science from Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Ishikawa, Japan, in 2017 and 2014, respectively. He received a B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology, Rajshahi, Bangladesh, in 2011. His research interests include autonomous systems, applied machine learning, motion planning under uncertainty, optimal control, deep learning-based perception methods, model checking, and related domains. He is an IEEE professional member and serves as an active reviewer for robotics, control, and transportation conferences and journals.

Nathaniel (Nate) Peachey has been an Engineering Manager at Qorvo for 17 years. He manages a design group that develops the ESD protection circuits and I/O padrings for Qorvo’s products. Nate received his PhD in Physical Chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and was a Director’s Funded Postdoctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and Sr. Vice President of the ESD Association.

Younho Seong received Ph.D. degree in industrial engineering from State University of New York at Buffalo in 2002. He is currently Professor of industrial and systems engineering with North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC, USA. His research interests include cognitive engineering, ecological approaches to human judgment & decision-making, machine learning, human trust in automation, social aspect of autonomous vehicles, human–robot interaction, designing interventions to support human cognition, virtual and augmented reality, neuroergonomics, and brain–computer interface.

Prakarsh Singh is a Senior Economist and Manager at Prime Science, Amazon. At Amazon, he has worked on Econometrics and Machine Learning models related to Impact of COVID-19 on Worker Productivity, Behavioral nudges for Managers, Network Analysis, Marketing Optimization, Downstream Impact of Brand Awareness and Creatives Valuation. Prior to Amazon, he was a professor of development economics at Amherst College, Massachusetts with twenty peer-reviewed publications in economics journals.

Dr. Sundaresan obtained his Ph. D. from Virginia Tech in 1988 in Engineering Mechanics and started his teaching career at University of Miami. He joined NC A&T SU in 1996. His areas of specialization are Nondestructive Evaluation, Structural Health Monitoring, and Composite Materials. He has graduated numerous doctoral and master’s students at A&T who are currently serving in industry and government.

Dr. Ray Tesiero is an Assistant Professor in Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering Department with over 25 years of industry experience in manufacturing and engineering design. His research interest is Building Energy System Optimization.

Dr. Xie received Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 2001. After working for eight years in semiconductor industry including Agere Systems, Qorvo, and DSM solutions, he joined NC A&T SU in 2009. Dr. Xie is a senior IEEE member and active in IEEE local community.

Eric Yi is an Applied Scientist at Prime Machine Learning team of Amazon. He obtained a PhD in Statistics from University of Iowa in 2016, and his research interests have been primarily in the fields of high dimensional statistics, large scale optimization, and machine learning. After graduation he first worked at Expedia and then joined Amazon in 2019. At both companies, his work has been mainly focused on applying advanced machine learning and statistical models to solve business problems and optimize customer experiences.

Eunsoo Yoo is a faculty member at the Chemical, Biological and Bioengineering (CBBE) department at North Carolina A&T State University. His research interests involve 1) using nanoparticles as means of detecting disease through molecular imaging and treating disease with drug delivery for cardiovascular disease (Atherosclerosis), cancer, and inner ear detoxification (for hearing loss), and 2) treating cancer such as melanoma and leukemia via hyperthermic effect of gold nanoparticles, and 3) exploring and understanding the role of extracellular vesicles (exosomes or EVs) in tumor metastasis, inflammation disease, brain injuries, and neurodegenerative disorders. 

Dr. Xiaohong Yuan is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at North Carolina A&T State University (NC A&T). She had served as the Director of Center for Cyber Defense at NC A&T, a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education (CAE-CDE) and in Research (CAE-R) designated by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security for more than ten years. She earned her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University.