Faculty

Bob Karlicek headshot
Robert F. Karlicek, Jr.
Center Director of LESA & Professor, ECSE

Dr. Robert F. Karlicek, Jr. is the Director of the Center for Lighting Enabled Systems & Applications (LESA) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an NSF and industry funded program exploring advanced applications for next generation solid state lighting systems.

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karlir@rpi.edu

Rich Radke headshot
Richard Radke
Deputy Director of LESA and Professor, ECSE

Richard J. Radke is a professor in the Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering department. His current research interests involve computer vision problems related to human-scale, occupant-aware environments, such as person tracking and re-identification with cameras and range sensors. 

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rjradke@rpi.edu

Dennis Shelden
Dennis Shelden
Director of CASE and Associate Professor, Architecture

Dennis Shelden is the Director of the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE) and an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at Rensselaer. He is a licensed architect, academic, author, and entrepreneur, whose experience spans architecture, engineering, and computer science applications to professional practice and the built environment. He writes and lectures widely on these topics from theoretical and technical as well as professional practice, economic, and industry transformation perspectives. He holds three degrees from MIT: a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Design, a Master of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Design and Computation conducted under the advisement of the late William J. Mitchell.

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sheldd@rpi.edu

Alex Tsamis
Alexandros Tsamis
Associate Director of CASE and Associate Professor, Architecture

Alexandros Tsamis is an architect and associate professor with tenure at the School of Architecture, RPI. He currently serves as the Graduate Program Director of the Built Ecologies MS & Ph.D. programs and as the Associate Director of CASE. He earned his Ph.D. in Architecture, Design and Computation and Master of Science (SMArchS) in Design and Building Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Previously, he served as the Post-professional Graduate Program Director in Design at Adolfo Ibanez University in Chile and has taught at MIT and the Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University.

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tsamia@rpi.edu 

Luigi Vanfretti
Luigi Vanfretti
Professor, ECSE

Luigi Vanfretti (Senior Member, IEEE; Member, Modelica Association) leads ALSETLab on research in energy systems, electrical power systems, and aircraft electrification. His research includes cyber-physical system (CPS) modeling, simulation, stability, and control in energy systems, power grids, and electrified transportation.

Full Bio

vanfrl@rpi.edu 

Chaitanya Ullal
Chaitanya Ullal
Associate Professor, Materials Science and Engineering

Chaitanya Ullal is an Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He got his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at MIT and did a post-doc in the lab of Stefan Hell, at the former MPI-BPC in Goettingen, Germany. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an ACS PRF New Investigator Award, and the 2020 Eastern NY Alfred H. Geisler Memorial Award. His research interests are related to polymers, unconventional nanolithography, and optics. A current emphasis of his work is the imaging and patterning of 3D nanostructured polymers via superresolution optics, which circumvents the diffraction barrier and achieves nanoscale resolutions while using visible light and far-field optics.

Full Bio

ullalc@rpi.edu

Koushik Kar
Koushik Kar
Professor, ECSE

Koushik Kar has been with the Department of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) since Fall 2002. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2002, and an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the same university in 1999. He received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, in 1997. He has also held visiting research positions at Bell Laboratories, NJ, and IBM TJ Watson Research Center, NY. Professor Kar's core specialization is in control and optimization of networked systems, with special focus on data communication networks and more recently on energy flow networks. 

Full Bio

koushik@ecse.rpi.edu 

Agung Julius
Agung Julius
Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, ECSE

A. Agung Julius is a Professor at the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the School of Engineering. He is also a faculty member of the Rensselaer Center for Automation Technologies and Systems. His research interests lie in the intersection of systems and control theory, systems biology, and theoretical computer science. He received the Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) in Indonesia in 1998, and an MSc and Doctoral degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, in 2001 and 2005, respectively. Prior to joining Rensselaer, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Full Bio

agung@ecse.rpi.edu 

Mona Hella
Mona Hella
Professor, ECSE

Mona Mostafa Hella received the Ph.D. degree, in 2001, from The Ohio-State University, Columbus, Ohio, in Electrical Engineering. She was a senior designer at Spirea AB, Stockholm, Sweden working on CMOS power amplifiers (2000-2001). From 2001 to 2003, she was a senior circuit designer at RF Micro Devices Inc, Billerica, MA working on Optical communication circuits and silicon-based wireless systems. She joined the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2004 where she is now a full associate professor. 

Full Bio

hellam@ecse.rpi.edu 

Jonas Braasch
Jonas Braasch
Associate Director for Research, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) and Professor, Architecture

Jonas Braasch is a Professor at the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and teaches in the Graduate Program in Architectural Acoustics. He is also the Associate Director for Research of the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC). His research interests span collaborative virtual reality systems, binaural hearing, auditory modeling, multimodal integration, sensory substitution devices, aural architecture and creative processes in music improvisation. For his work, he has received funding from the National Science Foundation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, DFG (German Science Foundation), the European Research Council, New York State Council on the Arts, the Christopher and Dana Reeve and Craig H. Neilsen Foundations. He obtained a master’s degree from Dortmund University (Germany, 1998) in Physics and two Ph.D. degrees from Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany (2001, 2004) in Electrical Engineering/Information Science and Musicology. 

Full Bio

braasj@rpi.edu 

Tianyi Chen
Tianyi Chen
Assistant Professor, ECSE

Tianyi Chen has been with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) as an assistant professor since August 2019. In RPI, I am also an active member in the Rensselaer-IBM Artificial Intelligence Research Collaboration (AIRC). Prior to joining RPI, he received the doctoral degree from the University of Minnesota under the supervision of Prof. Georgios B. Giannakis. Dr. Chen is the inaugural recipient of IEEE Signal Processing Society Best PhD Dissertation Award in 2020, a recipient of NSF CAREER Award in 2021 and a recipient of Amazon Research Award in 2022. He is also a co-author of the Best Student Paper Award at the NeurIPS Federated Learning Workshop in 2020 and at IEEE ICASSP in 2021.

Full Bio

chent18@rpi.edu 

Paul Chow
Paul Chow
Professor, ECSE

From 1977-1989, Dr. Chow worked at General Electric Corporate Research and Development, Schenectady, NY. In the first two years, he was involved with developing CVD processes and characterization of doped tin oxide and indium oxide thin films for transparent electrode applications in solid-state imagers. From 1979-1982, his work on refractory metals and metal silicides included the deposition and plasma etching of these films as well as their incorporation into integrated-circuit processes and performance characterization of test devices and logic circuits. From 1982 to 1989, he participated in the design and process development of various discrete and integrable MOS-gated unipolar and bipolar devices (such as the MOSFET, IGBT and MCT). Also, he was involved with process architecture and integration of high-voltage power integrated circuits. Since 1989, he has been in the faculty of the Electrical, Systems and Computer Engineering Department of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.

Full Bio

chowt@rpi.edu

Zheyu Zhang
Zheyu Zhang
Assistant Professor, ECSE

Dr. Zheyu Zhang is an assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville from 2015 to 2018; Lead Power Electronics Engineer of General Electric Research at Niskayuna, NY, USA from 2018 to 2019; and Warren H. Owen – Duke Energy Assistant Professor of Engineering at Clemson University from 2019 to 2023. 

Full Bio

zhangz49@rpi.edu 

Liu Liu
Liu Liu
Assistant Professor, ECSE

Liu Liu has been with the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) as an assistant professor since July 2022. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests reside in the intersection between computer architecture and machine learning, towards high-performance, energy-efficient, and robust machine intelligence. He leads the research on Elastic Processing & Hardware Architectures, with publications in top-tier conferences on machine learning and computer architecture (e.g., ICML, ICLR, MICRO, and ASPLOS). He earned an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Santa Barbara in 2015. He is a recipient of the Peter J Frenkel Fellowship from the Institute of Energy Efficiency at UCSB.

Full Bio

liu.liu@rpi.edu

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