Dr. Ziqian (Cecilia) Dong is the principal investigator of the NYIT REU program. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York Institute of Technology. She received her B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Beijing, China in 1999. She received her M.S. in Electrical Engineering from New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ in 2002 and her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from New Jersey Institute of Technology in January 2008.

She was awarded the Hashimoto Prize for the best Ph.D. dissertation in Electrical Engineering. She is the recipient of 2006 and 2007 Hashimoto Fellowship for outstanding scholarship and recipient of the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame Graduate Student Award for her inventions in network switches. Her research interests include architecture design and analysis of practical buffered crossbar packet switches, network security and forensics, wireless sensor networks, social networks and assistive medical devices. She was associated with Networking Research Laboratory at New Jersey Institute of Technology and MySYNC Laboratory at Stevens Institute of Technology for her postdoctoral research. Her research has been funded by the NSF, DoD, Motorola and NYIT. She has served as a technical committee member in IEEE HPSR 2011, IEEE Sarnoff 2010 and 2011, IEEE Greencom 2011 and ChinaCom 2008. She is a member of IEEE Communications Society, IEEE Women in Engineering and American Society for Engineering Education.

Dr. Kiran Balagani is an assistant professor of computer science at New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), Old Westbury, NY. Before joining NYIT, he served as a research assistant professor at the Center for Secure Cyberspace, Louisiana Tech University. Dr. Balagani’s current research focuses on cyber-behavioral authentication and adversarial learning in behavior-centric systems. His research has been sponsored by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and US Air Force.

Dr. Balagani received the BS degree from Bangalore University, India, and the MS and PhD degrees from Louisiana Tech University, USA. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.

Dr. Xiaohui Cui is the faculty of the NYIT computer science department. His research interests include swarm intelligence, GPU computing, agent based modeling and simulation, cyber security, GIS and transportation, emergent behavior, complex system, high performance computing, social computing, and information retrieval. His research programs have been supported by Office of Navy Research, Department of Homeland Security, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Department of Energy and Lockheed Martin Company.

He and his researches have been reported by MSNBC, New Scientist magazine etc. In 2008 and 2009, he received the Department of Energy Outstanding Mentor Award and the Significant Event Award.

Dr. Farshid Delgosha received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, in 2007. The focus of his Ph.D. dissertation was in wavelet transform over finite fields, algebraic cryptography, and security aspects of wireless sensor networks. In 2006, he received the outstanding research award from the Center for Signal and Image Processing (CSIP), School of ECE, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Since 2007, he has been with the faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the New York Institute of Technology. He has been an IEEE member since 2002.

Dr. Wei Ding is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science, New York Institute of Technology. He received Ph.D. and M.S. from Louisiana State University and University of Science and Technology of China, respectively, both in Computer Science. He is a member of IEEE, ACM, and IEEE Communication Society. He is a registered engineer in China. He worked as a software engineer in China before he came to U. S. to pursue his Ph.D. Dr. Ding’s recent research involved sensor networks, cyber-physical systems, content-centric networking, network security, and synergy of peer-to-peer systems with other decentralized technologies.

He has published two books, five book chapters, and many peer reviewed journal and conference papers. He is the first author for majority of his publications. He has served as TPC (Technical Program Committee) member for IEEE ICC (2011, 2012), ICNC, IEEE GLOBECOM (2009 - 2013), IEEE WiMob, and iCOST, etc. He also served as reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Communication Letters, and Journal of Supercomputing, etc.

Dr. Paolo Gasti is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences at New York Institute of Technology. 
His research focuses on privacy-preserving genomic computation, biometrics, secure multi-party protocols and network security.

Prof. Gasti served as a member of the NDN project, which is an NSF-sponsored endeavor with the goal of designing a new Internet architecture. His work has been featured in articles by the New Scientist and MIT Technology review.

Prof. Gasti worked as a research scholar at University of California, Irvine. He received a Fulbright scholarship, under which he visited Johns Hopkins University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Genoa, Italy when his research pertained to the design of cryptographic schemes and network security.

Dr. Huanying (Helen) Gu is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at New York Institute of Technology. Her research interests include controlled terminologies, ontologies, object-oriented modeling, conceptual modeling, and medical informatics with an emphasis on controlled medical terminologies. Dr. Gu’s research has been supported by a National Library of Medicine (NLM) grant that focuses on partitioning and abstraction techniques for auditing and extending the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and by the UMDNJ foundation.

Dr. Gu has published more than 30 papers in international journals and conferences. Before joining NYIT, Dr. Gu was an associate professor in University of Medicine and Dentistry of NJ. She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Dr. Tao Zhang joined the faculty at New York Institute of Technology at Old Westbury in 2005. She is conducting research in the areas of wireless communications networking and WDM optical networks focusing on the design and analysis of network architectures and protocols. She is currently working on a NSF funded project.

She is a senior member of the IEEE since 2007. She served on NSF proposal Review Panel. Dr. Zhang received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Program Manager

Dr. Marta A. Panero serves as Associate for Strategic Partnerships and Adjunct Professor at the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences (SoECS) of the New York Institute of Technology. She works with the school’s Dean to coordinate an Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation Center and to develop and fund multidisciplinary initiatives. Currently, she coordinates a multi-national educational effort that incorporates business, engineering, and environmental education to provide technically innovative skills training to support the workforce that will implement cleaner production practices in Latin America. With previous appointments at New York University and the NY Academy of Sciences, her research interests span from sustainable economics to industrial ecology, material flow accounting and pollution prevention, to greening transportation and freight logistics. Panero received her Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research with a concentration in economic development and environmental economics. She graduated Summa cum Laude from Fordham University with a B.A. in Social Studies. Panero grew up in Latin America and is fluent in both English and Spanish.

Graduate Students

Randolf Espejo received his B.S. in Computer Science from NYIT in 2012. Randy is now pursuing his Master's in Computer Science and conducting research on Smartphone Geolocation with Dr Dong. He is a Graduate Assistant and the Social Media Coordinator for the 2013 REU program.

Gene Locklear is a Graduate Assistant and the Web Content and Design Coordinator for the 2013 REU program.