The College of Engineering welcomes four new faculty members

As one of the fastest growing colleges/schools at Temple University, the College of Engineering is agressively increasing the size of its faculty. Consequently, four talented individulas have joined the college this past summer and fall. Additionally, the college is currently conducting seven faculty searches across the four academic departments.

David Brookstein, Director of Undergraduate Affairs and Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Dr. Brookstein earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT. He served as an assistant professor at Georgia Tech before joining an engineering and science industrial research laboratory where he ultimately became the associate director. Dr. Brookstein returned to academia, as dean of the School of Engineering and Textiles at Philadelphia University and later, executive dean for university research. Regarded as an engineering innovator, he has been granted twelve patents with an additional two pending. Dr. Brookstein is also a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Harsh Chopra, Chair and Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Professor Chopra earned his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park. Prior to joining Temple University, he served as professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at University of Buffalo, State University of New York as well as Program Director, Metallic Materials&Nanostructures in the Division of Materials Research at NSF. For well over a decade he has pioneered approaches to study evolution of various physical properties (magnetic, mechanical, magnetoelastic, spin transmission, etc.) from quantum sized devices to the bulk, a field now being referred to as 'Materials Genomics'. He publishes extensively on magnetic materials and micromagnetics, spintronics, quantum properties in nanostructures, and multiferroics. Dr. Chopra has published in journals as varied as Phyiscal Review, Nature Materials, Philosophical Magazine to Applied Physics Letters.

Ahmed Faheem, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Dr. Faheem earned a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He served as a post doctoral fellow at the Modified Asphalt Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before leading the research department at Bloom Companies LLC in Milwaukee, WI. Prior to joining Temple University, Dr. Faheem was appointed an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. His research interests include pavement performance characterization; asphalt binder, mastic and mixture laboratory characterization; and rheological analysis and modeling. Dr. Faheem has numerous publications in journals such as the Transportation Research Record and International Journal of Mechanical Sciences.

Ralph Oyini Mbouna, Assistant Professor, Teaching/Instructional, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Dr. Mbouna earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Temple University. His current research interests are pattern recognition and computer vision including gaze estimation and tracking, driver alertness monitoring, shape modeling and motion recovery from images, 3-D face reconstruction, and biometric identification. The work conducted by Dr. Mbouna is motivated by applications in the fields of digital imaging, thermal infrared imaging, human-machine interfaces and robotics. Dr. Mbouna has several publications in peer-reviewed journals such as IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

Ying Julie Zhu, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Dr. Zhu earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University. Prior to joining Temple University, she was a research scientist and technical manager at Siemens Corporate Research, where she developed a wide range of computer vision, machine learning and pattern recognition techniques for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), video surveillance and image guided medical interventions. Her research focuses on computer vision, machine learning, object detection and tracking theory, robust nonparametric Bayesian methods, sensor fusion and medical imaging. Dr. Zhu is the author/ co-author of over 40 peer-reviewed search articles and holds 18 granted patents.