The Vanderbilt University School of Engineering announces the appointment of a senior faculty member and five junior faculty members representing biomedical, civil, and computer science departments.
Audrey Ellerbee Bowden is an associate professor of biomedical engineering. She joins the School of Engineering as a tenured professor from Stanford University where she was a member of the electrical engineering faculty for eight years.
Her research interests include biomedical optics and microfluidics for applications to medicine and biology, such as early detection, diagnosis and therapy for cancer, and development and deployment of low-cost, high-performing point-of-care technologies for rural and global health application.
Bowden has been named the 2018 Dorothy J. Wingfield Phillips Chancellor Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt. The fellowship is named in honor of Dr. Phillips, BA’67, the first African American woman to receive an undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt. It is awarded to midcareer faculty members who are leaders in diversity in STEM–science, technology, engineering and math–education at the university.
She is a member of the Optical Society and a senior member of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Air Force Young Investigator Award, a NSF Early Career Award, the Hellman Faculty Scholars Award, and the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award. She is a former associate editor of IEEE Photonics Journal and a member of numerous professional committees.
Bowden received a B.S.E. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Duke University. She completed postdoctoral training in chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. During her career, Bowden has served as an International Fellow at Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore and as a Legislative Assistant in the United States Senate through the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellows Program sponsored by the OSA and SPIE.
Five additional professors have joined the school as full-time faculty members. They are Matthew Berger, Catie Chang, Jesus Gomez Velez, Ipek Oguz and Mikail Rubinov.
Matthew Berger is an assistant professor of computer science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research is at the interface of data visualization and machine learning. He focuses on how to leverage machine-learning techniques to improve visual data exploration, and how visualization helps various aspects of machine learning.
Berger joins the department from the University of Arizona where he was a postdoctoral scholar. He received a BS and MS degrees in computer science from Binghamton University and a Ph.D. in computing from the University of Utah.
Catie Chang is an assistant professor of computer science, electrical engineering and computer engineering.
Her research focuses on data analysis and experimental methods for studying human brain function with fMRI and EEG, and she collaborates closely with investigators in psychology, medicine and neuroscience.
Chang was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Fellow at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NIH Intramural Research, in the Advanced MRI Section. She received a S.B. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Jesus Gomez-Velez is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. Gomez-Velez joins the school from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology where he was an assistant professor of hydrology. He was a National Research Program postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Geological Survey.
His research combines numerical and analytical modeling, data mining and assimilation, and field and laboratory observations to understand of how water, solutes, and energy move through landscapes and river systems and the implications of these transport processes for humans and ecosystems.
Gomez-Velez received a B.S. degree in civil engineering from National University of Colombia at Medellin and M.S. degrees in applied mathematics and hydrology and a Ph.D. degree in hydrology from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
Ipek Oguz is an assistant professor of computer science. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, she worked in the Penn Image Computing and Science Laboratory and Center for Biomedical Image Computing and Analytics at the University of Pennsylvania as well as in the Iowa Institute for Biomedical Imaging at the University of Iowa.
Her research is in the field of medical image analysis, specifically in the development of novel methodology for quantitative medical image analysis with applications to neuroimaging, including Huntington’s disease and multiple sclerosis, as well as ophthalmic and obstetric imaging. She is a member of the Women in MICCAI Committee (Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society) and was co-chair of Information Processing in Medical Imaging 2017.
She received a B.S. degree in computer engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Mikail Rubinov is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering. He joins the school from the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute where he was a visiting scientist. Prior to that post, he was a Junior Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Churchill College, University of Cambridge.
His work combines algorithmic development in network science with insights from cognitive and clinical neuroscience, to analyze and model whole-brain structure and activity across species and scales, in healthy and diseased states.
Multiple grants and awards, including a NARSAD Young Investigator Award and an Isaac Newton Trust Research Grant, have supported his research. His work has been published in top-tier scientific journals, including Nature Communications, Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Brain, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Rubinov completed a Medical Doctorate at the University of Melbourne and received a Ph.D. degree in network neuroscience from the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Contact: Brenda Ellis, (615) 343-6314
brenda.ellis@vanderbilt.edu