August 13, 2007
College of Science welcomes three faculty members
CARBONDALE, Ill. — Three new faculty members will join the ranks of scientists and researchers in the College of Science at Southern Illinois University Carbondale this fall.
Jay Means, who also recently joined the faculty as dean of the College of Science, said the new faculty members are important additions to the college.
"Each of these new individuals brings with them new skills and energy to their home departments, their classrooms and research laboratories and to the SIUC learning community at large," Means said. "I welcome each of them and will work to see that they succeed here at SIUC."
The new faculty members are:
• Qiang Cheng, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science.
Cheng earned his doctorate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2002. Cheng previously worked at Wayne State University in Michigan and was a fellow at the Air Force Research Laboratory. He also is a senior researcher at Siemens Medical, Siemens Corp.
Cheng's research interests include signal, image and multimedia processing and learning theory. Cheng studies how such areas relate to multimedia computing, communications and biomedical areas. His past work includes multimedia information forensics, computer security and pattern recognition. He now mostly focuses on biomedical information and image processing, looking for ways to combine different such technologies and process large amounts of data to improve early diagnosis of disease and injury.
• Joseph Hundley, assistant professor, Department of Mathematics.
Hundley earned his doctorate in mathematics in 2002 at Columbia University. He previously served as the S. Chowla Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn State University and was a visiting fellow at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in India. Most recently, Hundley was a postdoctoral researcher in Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Hundley's work focuses on number theory dealing with automorphic forms, which encode deep arithmetic information, and L functions.
• Kyu Hong Cho, assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology.
Cho earned his doctorate in 2001 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He served as a staff scientist from 2006 to 2007 at Washington University School of Medicine in Missouri and as a post-doctoral fellow from 2001 to 2006 there. He also was a research scientist from 1990 to 1996 Samyang Genex Research Institute, Taejon, Korea.
Cho's work focuses on virulence factors associated with the human pathogen S. pyogenes at the genetic level. His long-term goal is to study host-pathogen interactions involving S. pyogenes.