The Vanderbilt University School of Engineering announces the appointment of four new faculty members to its full-time teaching staff.
They are Melissa Skala, Jason Valentine, Nabil Simaan and Matthew Lang.
Assistant professor of biomedical engineering Melissa Skala focuses her research on optical spectroscopy and nanotechnology for cancer diagnosis and therapy. She joins the department’s Biomedical Optics and Biophotonics Laboratory. Prior to coming to VUSE, she served as a postdoctoral research fellow at Duke University. She received a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Duke University in 2007.
Assistant professor of mechanical engineering Jason Valentine’s research interests include optical metamaterials, active photonics, solar energy conversion, and scalable 3D nanomanufacturing. Valentine joins VUSE from the University of California-Berkeley. He completed a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 2010 at UC-Berkeley.
Associate professor of mechanical engineering Nabil Simaan’s research focus is medical robotics, design and control of intelligent robotic slaves and novel robot architectures as technological enablers for demanding surgical tasks. Simaan joins VUSE from Columbia University. He moved his Advanced Robotics and Mechanism Applications laboratory from Columbia to the mechanical engineering department to join efforts in core research strengths in medical and health care technologies at Vanderbilt. He completed his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 2002 at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa.
Associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering Matthew Lang focuses his research on molecular and cellular machines, biological motors, and single molecule biophysics. Lang joins VUSE from MIT where he was an associate professor of mechanical engineering and biological engineering. He also was a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, and a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University. He completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Chicago.