August 12, 2008

Three faculty members join engineering college

by Tim Crosby

CARBONDALE, Ill. -- Three new faculty members will join the College of Engineering at Southern Illinois University Carbondale this fall.

Two faculty members will join the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering while the third will join the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Ramanarayanan Viswanathan, interim dean of the College of Engineering, said he is pleased to welcome the new faculty members, all of whom will hold the title of assistant professor.

“They bring expertise which will further strengthen the college’s curriculum and graduate research,” Viswanathan said. “All of them had industrial work and internship experience, which will enable them to advise students on engineering work-place skills and expectations.”

Joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering are:

• Harini Ramaprasad

Ramaprasad earned her bachelor’s degree in 2001 at Bangalore University, India in computer science. She earned her master’s degree in 2006 and her doctorate in 2008, at North Carolina State University.

Ramaprasad’s research interests include real time and embedded systems, operating systems, compliers and computer architecture. She focuses on improving worst-case execution time estimates in the presence of data caches and enhancing existing analysis techniques for characterizing data cache behavior.

• Xiangping “Sandra” Qin

Qin earned her bachelor’s degree in 1998 in electronic engineering and her master’s degree in 2000 at Tsinghua University, China. She earned her doctorate in 2005 at Northwestern University.

Qin’s research interests include wireless communication data networking. She worked as a senior engineer in the advanced research laboratory at Samsung Information System America, where her work included designing power efficient media access control for wireless networks supporting high definition audio/video and spatial reuse. She currently researches system design on security and content protection and emerging technologies such as wireless sensor networks, wireless body area networks for medical applications and mobile video wireless networks.

Joining the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is:

• Gregory V. Wilkerson

Wilkerson earned his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1989 at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He earned his master’s degree in 1995 and doctorate in 1999 at Colorado State University.

Wilkerson’s research interests include water resource engineering problems, multi-disciplinary approaches to stream restoration, river mechanics, sedimentation and erosion, environmental hydraulics, engineering hydrology and statistics. He currently research involves analytical model development for bioengineered systems, hydraulic geometry and quantifying the impact of increased water discharge in ephemeral channels. He is a principal investigator with the National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics, a National Science Foundation center.