Three ECE faculty have been elected as endowed chairs by the Cornell University Board of Trustees.
Debdeep Jena, Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, was elected the David E. Burr Professor of Engineering, effective November 1, 2018.
Jena joined Cornell in 2015 as a Richard E. Lunquist Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow with a joint appointment in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Material Science and Engineering. Prior to that, he was a professor at the University of Notre Dame from 2003 to 2014.
Jena received the B. Tech. degree with a major in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2003.
His research and teaching interests are in the MBE growth and device applications of quantum semiconductor heterostructures with a long running interest in III-V nitride semiconductors, investigation of charge transport in nanostructured semiconducting materials such as nanowires, 2D layered crystals as well as superconductors, and their device applications, and in the theory of charge, heat, and spin transport in semiconductor nanomaterials and multiferroics.
He is the author on a few hundreds of journal publications, including articles in Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters, and Electron Device Letters among others. He has received two best student paper awards in 2000 and 2002 for his Ph.D. dissertation research, the NSF CAREER award in 2007, the Joyce award for excellence in undergraduate teaching in 2010, the most valuable contribution awards at WOCSEMMAD in 2008, 2010 and 2014, the IBM Faculty award in 2012, the ISCS Young Scientist Award in 2012, and the International MBE Young Scientist award in 2014. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2017.
Huili Grace Xing, Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, was elected the first William L. Quackenbush Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, effective November 1, 2018.
Xing joined Cornell in 2015 as a Richard E. Lunquist Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow with a joint appointment in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Material Science and Engineering. Prior to that, she was a professor at the University of Notre Dame from 2004 to 2014. Xing received a Bachelor Degree in Physics from Peking University, pursued a Master Degree in Material Science and Engineering at Lehigh University. She earned a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Xing works with semiconductors and devices that use novel material properties and her research interests are material growth, device design, fabrication and characterization, such as III-N materials family, 2D crystal family, Ga2O3 family, Steep slope switches, and multiferroics for high-performance applications.
She is the recipient of the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors (ISCS) Young Scientist Award (2014), the NSF CAREER Award (2009), and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award (2008). While on the faculty of Notre Dame, she held the title of John Cardinal O’Hare CSC professorship, received an Outstanding Faculty Award and was featured at the UND-BYU football game in 2012.
Qing Zhao, Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, was elected a Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering, effective November 1, 2018.
Zhao joined Cornell University in 2015 as a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Gordon Lankton Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow. Prior to that, she was a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Davis from 2004 to 2015 and a system engineer with Aware., Inc. from 2001 to 2003. She received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 2001.
Her research interests include sequential decision theory, stochastic optimization, machine learning, and algorithmic theory with applications in infrastructure, communications, and social-economic networks.
Zhao is a Fellow of IEEE, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow of the European Union research and innovation program, and a Jubilee Chair Professor of Chalmers University during her 2018-2019 sabbatical leave. She received the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award and the 2000 Young Author Best Paper Award from IEEE Signal Processing Society. While on the faculty of UC Davis, she held the title of UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow and received the 2014 Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Research Award and the 2008 Outstanding Junior Faculty Award from the UC Davis College of Engineering.
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