Strengthening research and education with new Michigan Engineering faculty hires
Hiring brings a cohort of 19 new tenured and tenure-track faculty to the College this year.
Michigan Engineering adds a broad array of expertise in research and education for the 2025-2026 academic year with the addition of 19 new tenured and tenure-track faculty. These faculty join departments across the College, bringing experience in areas including AI, energy, advanced materials and more.
The total number of tenured and tenure-track faculty for Fall 2025 is over 470. Michigan Engineering received more than 2,150 applications for faculty positions last year, for a hiring rate of less than 1%.
“We’re thrilled to welcome these talented new faculty members to Michigan Engineering,” said Karen A. Thole, Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering and a professor of mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering. “They bring a wide range of expertise and fresh perspectives that will strengthen both our research outcomes and educational offerings to support the success of every student. Faculty hiring takes an incredible amount of effort, and I also want to acknowledge the important contributions of many faculty and staff to this endeavor.”
Find out more about the new Michigan Engineering faculty members below.
Christopher Browne
Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering
Starting January 1, 2026
Christopher Browne joins Michigan Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a postdoctoral researcher. His research focuses on harnessing instabilities in complex fluids by developing experimental systems that allow for direct imaging of fluid flow in 3D, disordered spaces. He applies this strategy to enhance chemical reactions in porous media flows and to study emergent, spontaneous flows in liquid crystal networks, with insights that can be applied to industrial sustainability and human health.
Yulong Dong
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Starting January 1, 2026
Yulong Dong was most recently a researcher in the Bay Area, where he focused on quantum and scientific computing. His research sits at the intersection of numerical analysis, statistics, optimization and learning, with a particular emphasis on quantum applications. His work ranges from developing optimal calibration protocols for quantum hardware to designing efficient quantum algorithms for scientific computing tasks.
Jun Gao
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Starting January 1, 2026
Jun Gao joins Michigan Engineering from NVIDIA, where he worked as a research scientist. He is interested in developing 3D generative AI models to create realistic, high-quality and diverse 3D content for reconstructing, generating and simulating lifelike 3D worlds, catalyzing applications across VR/AR, robotics, autonomous vehicles and more broadly the metaverse.
Maha Haji
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Maha Haji was most recently an assistant professor at Cornell Engineering in the fields of mechanical, aerospace and systems engineering. Her research focuses on developing computational methods to design and optimize complex offshore systems and the marine robots that support them. She creates system-level solutions for generating energy and fresh water, advancing food systems, and enabling critical mineral extraction. Through this work, she advances the blue economy, building efficient, resilient and scalable offshore systems that strengthen coastal communities and contribute to a sustainable future.
Jingwen Hu
Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering
Jingwen Hu joins the department of industrial and operations engineering from the Biosciences Group at the U-M Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and the U-M department of mechanical engineering, where he continues to hold appointments. His research focuses on injury biomechanics and human modeling, using a multidisciplinary approach that integrates experimental, computational and epidemiological methods. His research ultimately aims at injury prevention for all, with vehicle safety design as a primary area of focus.
Matthew Hughes
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Starting January 1, 2026
Matthew Hughes joins Michigan Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a research scientist. His research focuses on developing adaptive thermal energy systems that tailor the underlying thermal transport processes to changes in energy supply and demand. He achieves this by combining passive and active techniques to control multiphase flow and heat transfer mechanisms within the system itself, rather than just its operating conditions (e.g., using ultrasound to control bubble dynamics and other multiphase flow regimes). His work has potential applications in integrated data center cooling and clean hydrogen production, with broader benefits for sustainable energy technologies.
Q. Vera Liao
Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Q. Vera Liao most recently worked at Microsoft Research, where she was a Principal Researcher in the FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics of AI) group. With a background in human-computer interaction, her research focuses on human-computer interaction and responsible AI, with an emphasis on AI explainability and transparency. She aims to bridge emerging AI technologies with human-centered perspectives to create more trustworthy, beneficial, and safer systems.
Chima Maduka
Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Chima Maduka joins Michigan Engineering after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Colorado—Boulder. His work is at the intersection of immunometabolism, drug delivery and chronic inflammatory diseases, especially the different phenotypes of heart failure. He aims to uncover insights into the role of immune cell metabolism in driving disease progression, such as in heart failure post-myocardial infarction. Maduka’s work primarily focuses on heart failure, but the methodologies have potential for application to chronic conditions such as vascular and immune pathologies, cancer, obesity and diabetes.
Delia Milliron
Professor and Anthony C. Lembke Department Chair of Chemical Engineering
Delia Milliron joins Michigan Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a professor in the departments of chemistry and chemical engineering and served as the department chair. Her research focuses on emergent properties of nanocrystal-based materials, with applications to addressing global challenges in energy efficiency and sustainability, including the development of energy-saving smart windows and clean energy technologies.
Alan Papalia
Assistant Professor of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering
Starting January 1, 2026
Alan Papalia joins Michigan Engineering from Northeastern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program. His work focuses on the algorithmic foundations of efficient and robust autonomy, specifically to enhance our ability to understand the ocean and its role in the health of the planet. He develops robust algorithms for autonomous marine navigation, establishes frameworks for heterogeneous and human-in-the-loop autonomy, and performs real-world validation on low-cost marine robots.
Thomas Swinburne
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Thomas Swinburne joins Michigan Engineering from CNRS Physique in France, where he worked as a researcher. His research combines analytic theories and machine learning methods to study plasticity, diffusion and thermodynamics in alloys, often applied to nuclear materials. A particular focus is multiscale uncertainty quantification. He aims to predict how metallic microstructure forms and evolves for new insight into how engineering components fail, a central challenge of structural materials science.
Roozbeh Tabrizian
Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Roozbeh Tabrizian was most recently an Associate Professor at the University of Florida. His research explores semiconductor micro- and nano-electro-mechanical systems (N/MEMS), combining electronics with mechanics, piezoelectrics and ferroics to push performance limits and build resilient systems for extreme conditions. His work targets the realization of ultra-stable clocks, resilient physical sensors and computers, scalable microwave processors and combs, and chip-scale engines and coolers for future technologies.
Yulun Tian
Assistant Professor of Robotics
Yulun Tian joins Michigan Engineering after completing his postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on developing scalable and trustworthy autonomy that operates robustly over long periods of time without human intervention. He applies tools from nonlinear and distributed optimization, machine learning, and graph theory to develop principled algorithms with theoretical guarantees and real-world systems for spatial perception, navigation, and multi-agent systems.
Thomas Truskett
Vennema Professor of Chemical Engineering
Thomas Truskett was most recently on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as chemical engineering department chair for eight years. He is internationally recognized for his work at the intersection of molecular thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and materials science. Using theory and computer simulations, his group studies the engineering properties of condensed matter, from protein solutions to colloidal assemblies.
Weichao Tu
Associate Professor of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering
Weichao Tu comes to Michigan Engineering from West Virginia University, where she was an associate professor. Her research focuses on space plasma physics, using numerical simulations and quantitative analysis to investigate plasma dynamics. Her work aims to improve our understanding of plasma behavior to help with space weather applications such as satellite protection.
Sushil Varma
Assistant Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering
Sushil Varma was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at INRIA Paris. His research focuses on designing mathematically grounded, practically implementable algorithms for complex systems such as online marketplaces and electric vehicle-based transportation networks. His work addresses pricing, charging and matching decisions in spatially distributed platforms, offering scalable solutions for real-world systems.
Ricardo Vinuesa
Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering
Ricardo Vinuesa joins Michigan Engineering from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, where he was an associate professor. His research uses computational methods and AI to study and control turbulent flows, with important implications in the areas of sustainable air travel and urban canyons. He also led influential work on the impact of AI on the Sustainability Agendas of the United Nations, which influenced the AI Act regulating AI in Europe.
Manhua Wang
Assistant Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering
Manhua Wang was most recently a postdoctoral associate at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on creating trustworthy and transparent human-AI systems, with a particular emphasis on intelligent transportation and automated vehicles. She studies how AI systems, including in-vehicle agents, can be designed to be more transparent and adaptable, and is expanding her work to create accessible technologies for neurodiverse individuals.
Yan-Ran (Joyce) Wang
Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Yan-Ran (Joyce) Wang joins Michigan Engineering after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Her research harnesses cutting-edge AI and machine learning to develop transformative medical solutions and advance precision medicine. By integrating deep learning, generative AI and multimodal representation learning, she designs algorithms that can extract insights from complex biomedical data and translate them into actionable clinical knowledge. Her work spans automated diagnostics and AI-driven precision medicine, with particular emphasis on cardiovascular disease, cancer and neurological disorders—areas where algorithmic innovation has the potential to directly impact patient care.