School Welcomes Four New Assistant Professors

Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) is continuing to grow with the hire of four tenure-track faculty.

Assistant Professors Peng Chen and Victor Fung joined CSE at the beginning of the 2022 fall semester. Elizabeth Qian began work Nov. 1 at Georgia Tech as a joint appointment assistant professor with the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and the School of CSE. Nisha Chandramoorthy will join the School in Spring 2023 as an assistant professor.

The addition of these professors increases the School of CSE’s faculty total to 24, the highest in School history. This expansion is emblematic of the School’s enduring mission to develop scholars who solve real-world problems through advances in computational modeling methods and techniques.

Peng Chen comes to CSE from the University of Texas at Austin where he was a research scientist with the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral associate and instructor at ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule), a public research university in Zürich, Switzerland.

Chen attained his Ph.D. in 2014 in computational mathematics and M.S. in 2011 in mathematical sciences at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) in Switzerland. In 2009, he received his B.S. in mathematics from Xi’an Jiatong University.

“I found the faculty and staff members at CSE very generous and supportive in helping junior faculty for career development by providing various, interactive opportunities,” said Chen. “I also like the collaborative culture at Georgia Tech, which has ten interdisciplinary research institutes that bring researchers from different disciplines to work together in addressing topics of strategic importance such as data science, AI, energy, climate, and human health.”

Before arriving to Georgia Tech, Victor Fung was the Eugene P. Wigner Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he worked in the Nanomaterials Theory Institute.

Fung studied physical chemistry at the University of California, Riverside where he completed his Ph.D. in 2019. He attained his B.S. in 2015 from Cornell University where he majored in chemistry.

“CSE attracted me due to being a uniquely multidisciplinary department in the country which is well-situated to be at the forefront of research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the sciences,” Fung said. “So far, I have very much enjoyed being in the Atlanta area and also talking with all the students and faculty across various departments in the Institute.”

The addition of Elizabeth Qian raises CSE’s joint appointment professors total to five. She comes to Atlanta following a postdoctoral appointment as von Karman Instructor at CalTech in the Department of Computing + Mathematical Sciences.

Qian received all her degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). These include a S.B. in 2014 and S.M. in 2017, both in aerospace engineering, as well as her Ph.D. in 2021 in computational science and engineering.

“The first few weeks of being an assistant professor remind me a little of the first few weeks of college — there are a lot of new people and new systems to get to know, and all the faculty and staff have been really welcoming and eager to help me figure things out,” Qian said. “I’m looking forward to getting into the swing of things and teaching my first course in the Spring.”

Nisha Chandramoorthy also has ties to MIT where she most recently was a postdoctoral associate with their Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

Chandramoorthy attained her Ph.D. in 2021 and S.M. in 2016, both from MIT. Her doctorate is in mechanical engineering and computation while her master’s degree is in computation for design and optimization. She completed her B. Tech in mechanical engineering in 2014 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.

“By its nature, foundational research in computational mathematics is motivated by and can prove useful to practical questions in a variety of scientific and engineering fields,” said Chandramoorthy. “I sensed that CSE recognizes this and offers a place where applied mathematicians asking questions at various levels of abstractions can coexist and collaborate.”