Fall '07/Winter '08: Recognition: New Faculty

Shayla Sawyer has joined the Rensselaer faculty as assistant professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering. Her primary research objective is to characterize integrated, novel GaN-based sensor systems.

Before coming to Rensselaer, Sawyer was a visiting professor and researcher at the National Securities Technology Lab in Santa Barbara, California. While there, she created code for gamma detection mote sensors using ATMEL microprocessor applications, and she initiated discussion of collaborative efforts with Site Directed Research and Development projects.

Sawyer is a recent graduate of Rensselaer (2006), where she also worked as a postdoctoral candidate.

James Jian-Qiang Lu has been named associate professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering (ECSE). He is active in micro- and nanoelectronics, particularly in wafer-level 3D hyper-integration technology.

Before his current position, Lu held several titles in both ECSE and Rensselaer’s physics department. He has also served as a research associate at the University of Virginia, a research scientist at the Technical University of Munich, a Siemens Scholar, and a scholar of the German Academic Exchange Program (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst).

Lu is listed in the special Millennium Edition of Marquis Who’s Who in Science and Engineering and received the 2005 Rensselaer School of Engineering Research Excellence Award. He is a graduate of the Technical University of Munich.

Vesna Damljanovic has been appointed assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Her research program, aimed at multiscale reconstruction of tissue formation, focuses specifically on understanding how force is generated, modulated, and sensed at cytoskeletal and cellular level, and how those mechanisms affect the structure and function of tissues.

Damljanovic is a graduate of the University of Belgrade, Yugoslovia, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a member of the Biomedical Engineering Society, Biophysical Society, American Physical Society, and Acoustical Society of America.

Pete Tessier has recently come to Rensselaer as assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering. Most recently he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Susan Lindquist’s laboratory at the MIT Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. The winner of two other prestigious postdoctoral fellowships—one from the American Cancer Society and another from the National Institutes of Health—he has also received a NASA graduate research fellowship and the W. H. Peterson Award from the Biochemical Technology division of the American Chemical Society.

Tessier’s research focuses on the misfolding and aberrant aggregation of proteins, a cause of many neurodegenerative diseases. Specifically, he studies the formation of highly ordered, beta-sheet rich amyloid fibers, including prions, and the molecular basis of monoclonal antibody aggregation.

Sastry Sreepada has joined the School of Engineering as clinical assistant professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering. For the past several years, he has worked for the Navy Nuclear Program at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, where he managed reactor thermal hydraulic development and developed non-intrusive measurement techniques for multiphase flow, among other projects.

Earlier in his career, Sreepada served as manager of Columbia University’s Heat Transfer Facility, conducting thermal hydraulic testing for the nuclear industry worldwide. He has also worked on the design and development of heavy water reactors, light water reactors, and fast reactor concepts.