CSE welcomes 21 new faculty in 2025-26

College exceeds its goal of 60 faculty in three years 

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (10/01/2025) —The University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering welcomes 21 new tenured or tenure-track faculty in 2025-26. This builds upon 21 new faculty in 2024-25 and 26 new faculty in 2023-24—bringing the total to 68 new faculty over 3 years and exceeding the college's goal of 60. 

This growth aligns with the college’s increase in undergraduate students over the same three years to meet industry workforce demand.

Expertise is wide ranging, across fields. Faculty research topics include breast cancer progression, bacterial colony mechanics, smart manufacturing, and unmanned aerial systems fabrication, and flight testing. 

Meet our new science and engineering faculty:

Hudson Borja da Rocha is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering. His research interests include failure mechanisms and statistical precursors, damage and fracture in soft solids, mechanics of biological growth and remodeling, and fluctuation-driven cell motility. 

Geir Dullerud is a professor and the new head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He joins the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering leadership team from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he held faculty positions in mechanical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science. Dullerud’s research interests include optimization and machine learning, cyber-physical system security, cooperative robotics, and hybrid dynamical systems.

Rosana Esteller is a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. She joins the University of Minnesota after 25 years in the medical device industry, including leadership roles at Boston Scientific. She played a pivotal role as principal and founder of IntelliMedix Inc., which later merged with NeuroPace Inc. Her contributions were key to the world’s first closed-loop, brain-implantable neuromodulation device for epilepsy—groundbreaking technology now commercially available and powered by the biomarker detection algorithms she developed. 

Zhangyu Guan is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He is interested in AI-driven resource orchestration, network security, and testbed design for future wireless experimentation. His research and teaching involves wireless sensing, communications, and networking, with a focus on Advanced Air Mobility, Unmanned Aerial Systems systems (UAV), and intelligent NextG networks. He also explores UAV prototyping, fabrication, and flight testing.

Haoyang Guo is an assistant professor in the School of Mathematics. His core research interests include algebraic geometry and number theory, especially p-adic geometry and p-adic Hodge theory. Guo joins the University of Minnesota faculty from the University of Chicago. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in Germany.

Damennick Henry is an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics. His work in geometric theory and computational techniques aims to uncover order in chaotic dynamical environments for the next generation of spacecraft. Henry has been a visiting technologist at a variety of NASA centers including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering in 2018. 

“Allen” Lee Seung Hwan is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. His work bridges biotechnology and sustainable catalysis, harnessing enzymes that demonstrate versatile abilities under ambient conditions without requiring rare metals or toxic solvents. His research lab aims to expand biomanufacturing capabilities with carbon-neutral, cost-efficient feedstocks—while making bioconversion more efficient and scalable.

Guanyi Lu is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering who is interested in experimental and numerical investigations of rocks—specifically, their unique relationship to and influence on natural plus human-induced subsurface phenomena, including fluid-driven hydraulic fracturing and fault slip.

Swati Padmanabhan is an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering who specializes in algorithms for continuous optimization. Her research focuses on designing, with theoretically provable guarantees, fast algorithms for mathematical optimization problems arising in machine learning and theoretical computer science. 

Meera Ramaswamy is the Benjamin Mayhugh Assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering. Her research focuses on dense active suspensions, bacterial colony mechanics, and active fibre networks. Her past research studied the rheology and microstructure of shear thickening fluids—the physics behind people walking on cornstarch and water.

Behzad Rankouhi is the Richard & Barbara Nelson Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Minnesota Additive Manufacturing Center at the University of Minnesota. His research focus includes manufacturing of materials for extreme environments and the additive manufacturing of advanced metals and alloys.

Allen Román is the Richard and Barbara Nelson Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. His research spans three key areas—smart manufacturing, high-throughput characterization, and autonomous materials discovery—with the goal of advancing polymer and composite research. 

Aashrith Saraswathibhatla is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. His work provides fundamental insights into the mechanoregulation of breast cancer progression, with the potential to improve diagnosis and therapeutics. His lab investigates biophysics and mechanotransduction mechanisms of cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions during breast cancer progression using 2D and 3D in vitro models that mimic human physiological tissue conditions. 

Zihan Tan is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering who is interested in teaching theory-related courses—like algorithms, discrete math, combinatorial optimization, and graph theory—at all levels. His current research focuses on developing modern algorithms for processing massive graphs from the following aspects: graph compression, structural graph theory, and graph problems in modern computational models.

Kshitiz Upadhyay is an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics. His research aims to uncover the mechanics of soft materials through a tightly integrated approach combining advanced experiments with physics-informed modeling. Application areas include traumatic brain injury, injury biomechanics, protective systems, and accelerated materials discovery. 

Oskar Vafek is a professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy and William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute. He joins the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering faculty following a seven-year tenure as director of condensed matter theory at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Florida. His research involves a broad range of topics in quantum condensed matter theory, from superconductivity in correlated electron systems to Chern insulators in flat bands.

Julia Wilcots is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences who is interested in solving problems of Precambrian climate and understanding carbonate sedimentation throughout Earth history. Her research seeks to reconstruct the history of Earth’s climate in deep time using the physical and chemical records preserved in carbonate rocks. 

Xiaowen Zhu is an assistant professor in the School of Mathematics, with a background in mathematical physics. Her research focuses on the mathematical foundations of materials arising in condensed matter physics including topological insulators, localization for random/ergodic Schrodinger operators, and moiré materials.

Starting in 2026

Jihye Park is an incoming associate professor in the Department of Chemistry. Her research interests include nano materials, photochemical reactions, and renewable energy.

Zhenman Fang is joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His expertise lies in customizable computing, which includes designing accelerator-rich architectures to achieve energy gains.

Saeed Zeinolabedinzadeh is joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an associate professor. His research focuses on developing new RF, millimeter-wave and Terahertz integrated Microelectronic circuits (chips at DC - 300+ GHz), as well as, high-speed integrated electronics-photonics circuits.

Read about the 47 STEM experts who joined the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering in previous years in our fall 2024 news story.