Berkeley Engineering announces five new faculty fellows

Thanks to the generosity of a handful of Berkeley Engineering alumni and friends, five new and incoming faculty are joining the college with ample funding to help equip their labs, hire their first graduate students and get their research projects up and running. The Berkeley Engineering Faculty Fellows program debuted in 2018–19 with three fellowships of $250,000 supporting three junior faculty members. This year the cohort has expanded to five faculty, funded with $1.25 million in private gifts. Each fellowship grants the title and funding for five years.

• Zakaria Al-Balushi, the SK Hynix Faculty Fellow in Materials Science and Engineering, is exploring the creation of novel synthesis and integration schemes for emerging electronic and photonic low-dimensional materials, and the development of new instrumentation that will ultimately aid in the discovery of new materials for optoelectronics and viable quantum technologies.
• Derfogail Delcassian, the Fang Zhuang and Changlong Sheng Faculty Fellow in Bioengineering, builds artificial cells/lymph nodes and targeted drug and gene delivery systems to train and instruct immune cells.
• Alexis Kaminski, the Ho-Shang and Mei-Li Lee Faculty Fellow in Mechanical Engineering, is interested in problems involving waves and instabilities in stratified flows, and how these flows transition to turbulence and mix the background state.
• Sophia Shao, the SK Hynix Faculty Fellow in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, studies computer architecture with a special focus on specialized accelerator, heterogeneous architecture and agile VLSI design methodology.
• Alp Sipahigil, the Chang Hui Faculty Fellow in Electrical Engineering, has been focused on using nanoscale phononic and photonic structures to bring new functionalities to superconducting quantum circuits.