Susan Alber
Term Assistant Professor, Statistics
Dr. Alber received a BS and MS in Nutrition from Cornell University. She earned her MA in Biostatistics from Berkeley and her PhD from UCLA. She did her Postdoctoral work in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center. She focused on Bayesian methods in both her PhD Dissertation and postdoctoral research.
Before to coming to Mason she was a senior lecturer in the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, at the University of Otago, New Zealand, where she taught Epidemiology and Statistics and supervised medical students conducting research on health care research. She has authored numerous articles and presented her research on Bayesian methods at national and international conferences. Her current research is on developing of a new methodological framework for causal inference in non-randomized studies.
Oscar Barton Jr., PE
Professor and Director, Mechanical Engineering
Dr. Barton received a BS in1984 from Tuskegee University and an MS in 1987 from Howard University; both degrees are in mechanical engineering. In addition, he earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from Howard University in 1993.
Prior to coming to Mason, Barton served as professor and department chair of mechanical engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, where he coordinated interdisciplinary majors, programs, and professional courses with other department chairs. His research explores composite structural mechanics, approximate closed-form analysis, and variational methods.
Barton is a member of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, where he has been an Engineering Accreditation Commission commissioner since 2013 and chairs the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Committee on Engineering Accreditation. Over the course of his career, he has received numerous honors, including a Letter of Appreciation from the Director of Engineering and Weapons, a Letter of Commendation from the Superintendent, and the Navy Meritorious Commendation.
Anthony Battistini
Assistant Professor, Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental and Infrastructure Engineering
Dr. Anthony Battistini joined the CEIE Department in fall, 2014, adding another member to the department's structural engineering faculty. Battistini completed his PhD at the University of Texas in Austin, focusing on stability and fatigue behavior of cross frames for steel bridges. His PhD research involved very large-scale tests of steel cross frame performance, building on his MS research into steel bridge performance examining the effects on stiffness of different plate connections.
Battistini taught structural analysis and steel design last year at Washington State University in Pullman. He is teaching Statics, and Geomatics and Engineering Graphics in fall, 2014, and in spring, 2014, he will add steel design to his teaching portfolio.
Juan Cebral
Professor, Department of Bioengineering
Dr. Juan R. Cebral joins us as professor from the Center for Computational Fluid Dynamics in the College of Science at George Mason University. He earned his PhD in Computational Sciences and Informatics from George Mason University in 1996. His research focus is on image-based patient-specific computational modeling of cerebral blood flow and aneurysms. He is the PI of an NIH R21, Co-PI of an NIH R01, and PI of a grant from Philips Health Care (The Netherlands).
Parag Chitnis
Assistant Professor, Department of Bioengineering
Dr. Parag Chitnis earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University in 2007. Since 2008, Chitnis has been working at the F. L. Lizzi Center for Biomedical Engineering at Riverside Research as a Research Scientist. His research focus spans noninvasive ablation therapy using high-intensity focused ultrasound, interaction between high-frequency ultrasound and encapsulated microbubbles, and photoacoustic imaging. He is the PI of an NIH R21.
Monson Hayes
Professor and Department Chair, Electrical and Computer Engineering
After receiving an ScD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1981, Dr. Hayes joined the faculty in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. From 2006 until 2011, he was an associate chair for the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and associate director of Georgia Tech Savannah. Prior to coming to the Volgenau School, he was professor emeritus at Georgia Tech and a Distinguished Foreign Professor at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Korea.
Hayes has been internationally recognized for his contributions to the field of digital signal processing. He has published almost 200 articles in journals and conference proceedings and is the author of two textbooks. His current research projects include face recognition for personalization, lane tracking for driver awareness, hand and gesture recognition for multimedia applications, and equation recognition for handheld devices and the classroom.
Zhi Tian
Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Dr. Tian received a BE in electrical engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China, in 1994, and an MS and PhD from George Mason University in 1998 and 2000, respectively. From 1994 to 1995, she studied in the graduate program of the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and from 1995 to 2000, she was a graduate research assistant in what is now known as the Center of Excellence in Command, Control, Communications, Computing, and Intelligence (C4I) at Mason. Prior to receiving her faculty appointment at the Volgenau School this fall, she was a professor at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan.
Tian's general interests are in the areas of signal processing, communications, detection, and estimation. Her current research focuses on compressed sensing for random processes, statistical inference of network data, cognitive radio networks, and distributed wireless sensor networks. She received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2003.
A Fellow of IEEE, Tian serves as an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing for Communications and Networking Technical Committee and has served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2002‒08) and IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (2006‒09).
Thomas G. Winston
Instructor, Applied Information Technology
Thomas G. Winston has a background in telecommunications, information systems, and international relations. He has focused his career on country-based threats and cyber analysis for Central Eurasia, South Asia and the Middle East. He served as liaison officer at the Department of State and has extensive experience briefing U.S. Government officials on cyber issues. In addition, he has experience as a forensic cyber crime investigator and analyst. Winston has publications on international relations, law, foreign cyber threat and critical infrastructure protection
Winston's research interests include privacy and security issues in telemedicine; information security policy, protecting the critical infrastructure, and social and political impacts of technology.
Winston is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Information Systems at Nova Southeastern University. He earned his M.S. in Law, Policy, and Society at Northeastern University, Boston; an M.S. in Telecommunications from Boston University; an M.S. in Education, and a B.A in Linguistics/Russian from the State University of NY at Albany.
Kai Zeng
Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Kai Zeng joined George Mason University in fall 2014 as an assistant professor in the Volgenau School of Engineering. He received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in 2008. He was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Computer Science at University of California, Davis (UCD) from 2008 to 2011, and an assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at University of Michigan – Dearborn from 2011 to 2014.
Zeng was a recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award in 2012. He won Excellence in Postdoctoral Research Award at UCD in 2011 and Sigma Xi Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award at WPI in 2008. He was a visiting faculty of Air Force Research Laboratory through Visiting Faculty Research Program in summer 2013. His current research interests are in cyber physical system security and privacy, network forensics, physical layer security, and cognitive radio networks.
Yutao Zhong
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
Dr. Yutao Zhong re-joined Department of Computer Science at George Mason University as an assistant professor in fall 2014. She received a PhD degree (2005), and an MS (2002) in Computer Science both from University of Rochester; an ME (2000) and a BS (1997) degree in Computer Science from Nanjing University, China. She worked as an assistant professor in Department of Computer Science at George Mason University to 2010. Zhong's teaching areas are programming and computer systems. Her research interests focus on program analysis and optimization, compilers, performance monitoring and modeling, and programming languages.
