Five faculty members in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Rice have been promoted, effective July 1.
Promoted to full professor with tenure is Jacob Robinson, currently an associate professor of ECE and of bioengineering. Robinson earned his Ph.D. in applied physics from Cornell in 2008 and joined the Rice faculty in 2012. His research interests include development of nanofabricated devices to study the structural and functional dynamics of living neural circuits.
Promoted to associate professor with tenure are three assistant professors of ECE: Shengxi Huang, Lan Luan and Kaiyuan Yang.
Huang earned her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2017, served as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford and joined the Rice faculty in 2022. She works with low-dimensional materials, light-matter interactions, Raman spectroscopy, chemical and bio sensing, quantum optical emission and quantum sensing.
Lan earned her Ph.D. from Stanford in 2011, followed by three years at Harvard as a postdoctoral fellow in physics and five years at the University of Texas at Austin as a researcher. In 2019 she joined the faculty at Rice where her research focuses on developing multimodal neural interfaces combining electrical, optical and other technologies to monitor and manipulate brain activity.
Yang earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in ECE from the University of Michigan in 2017. That same year he joined Rice, where he heads the Secure and Intelligent Micro-Systems Lab. In 2022 he received an NSF CAREER Award for his work studying the reliability and security of wireless, battery-less, minimally invasive bioelectronics.
Promoted to associate research professor of ECE is Paul Cherukuri, vice president for innovation and adjunct professor of management and entrepreneurship at Rice. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Rice in 2007. Since returning to Rice in 2014, Cherukuri has served as a research scientist in chemistry and for more than six years as executive director of the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering.