Engineering Faculty to Collaborate with BNL Scientists

This summer, five faculty members from the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences will participate in Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Visiting Faculty Program, engaging in research collaborations with esteemed scientists and helping to strengthen research capacity and build long-term partnerships.

Faculty members were selected to participate based on their employment at an accredited university that is also an emerging research institution, as well as their accomplishments, interests, experience, and quality of their submitted research proposal co-developed with a Department of Energy laboratory researcher. They include:

• Karrer Alghazali, Ph.D., assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering
• Reza Khalaj Amineh, Ph.D., associate professor of electrical and computer engineering
• Maryam Ravan, Ph.D., research associate professor of electrical and computer engineering
• Xueqing (Summer) Huang, Ph.D., associate professor of computer science
• Wei Zeng, Ph.D., assistant professor of mechanical engineering

“The Visiting Faculty Program is a highly competitive United States Department of Energy-funded program,” notes Dean of the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences Babak D. Beheshti, Ph.D. “Participation in this program not only advances individual research agendas but also creates a powerful pipeline for student engagement, collaborative grants, and institutional visibility at one of the nation’s premier research laboratories.”

Kicking off on June 1, the 10-week program will group participants with scientific and engineering staff to work on a project of mutual interest. Those faculty members new to the program, including Alghazali, Huang, and Zeng, will follow the Research Collaboration track, designed to help university professors increase their research competitiveness and elevate their students’ learning and research. As returning faculty, Amineh and Ravan have the option to follow the Teaching Initiative track and will develop ideas for course content, certificate programs, seminars, modules, and learning resources to foster connections between STEM curriculum and students’ career opportunities.

Brookhaven National Lab is among 15 participating Department of Energy national laboratories across the United States. The labs collectively welcome roughly 100 faculty to the highly selective Visiting Faculty Program’s summer term.

“Congratulations to our faculty on this outstanding achievement and for continuing to represent our college at the highest level,” Beheshti says.

Brookhaven Lab is one of 10 national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The research facility’s Upton, N.Y., campus is home to seven Nobel Prize-winning discoveries and more than 75 years of transformative science and technology solutions addressing energy, environmental, and nuclear challenges.