Meet our new
FACULTY Mason Earles
Assistant Professor and Assistant Agricultural Engineer, Biological and Agricultural Engineering Earles brings expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) to agriculture by developing algorithms to help farmers better and more efficiently grow, treat and harvest their crops. His goal is to create agriculturespecific AI systems that can be easily and cheaply deployed in the field. An alumnus of UC Davis, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Plant Sciences and has an appointment in the Department of Viticulture and Enology.
Seung Sae Hong
Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering Hong’s research focuses on low-dimensional materials, with the goal of creating new materials that allow extreme straining and shape deformation in 3-D. He received his Ph.D. and completed his postdoctoral work in applied physics at Stanford University before joining UC Davis. He received the Graduate Student Award Gold Medal from the Materials Research Society in 2012.
Marina Leite
Matthew Ellis
Associate Professor, Materials Science and Engineering
Ellis is a systems engineer who specializes in model predictive control for applications in industry. He joined UC Davis after four years at an energy systems company. He received his Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCLA, where he won the Outstanding Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering Award in 2016.
Leite looks at materials for harvesting and storing energy, imaging materials at the nanoscale and photonics. She received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Campinas in Brazil and had been part of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics at the University of Maryland before joining UC Davis.
Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering
Houman Homayoun
Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Homayoun is an expert in hardware security, data-intensive computing and heterogeneous computing and has conducted research in big data computing and hardware accelerator design. He previously worked at George Mason University. He received his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering at UC Irvine and did two years of postdoctoral work at UC San Diego.
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Harishankar Manikantan Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering
Manikantan studies fluid mechanics, soft matter and complex fluids with a multidisciplinary background. He received his Ph.D. in applied mechanics from UC San Diego and was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Barbara before joining UC Davis. He received the James O. Smith Award for outstanding teaching as a teaching assistant while earning his master’s degree at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
