2010-2011 New Faculty

Chris Eamon joined the civil engineering faculty in fall 2010 as an associate professor. He earned a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Wisconsin, a master's degree in architecture and a master's degree and Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Michigan. His specialty is structural engineering. During pursuit of his college education, Eamon worked several years in architecture and engineering firms in Wisconsin and Southeast Michigan. When he finished his doctorate in 2000, he began his academic career at Mississippi State University. He left as an associate professor in 2008 to return to family in Michigan and joined the faculty at Lawrence Technological University before accepting his current position at WSU. Eamon's research interests include computational mechanics, the reliability of structures, nonlinear and dynamic analysis, and reliability-based design optimization.

Mahendra Kavdia joined the biomedical engineering faculty in fall 2010 as an associate professor. He received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, in 1992; a master's degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1995; and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Oklahoma State University in 2000. Kavdia taught biomedical engineering and cell and molecular biology at the University of Arkansas from 2004 until joining the WSU faculty. He was a postdoctoral fellow of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University from 2000 to 2003. He received the Arthur C. Guyton Award for Excellence in Integrative Physiology and Medicine from the American Physiological Society in 2008.

Zhifeng Kou joined the biomedical engineering department in fall 2010. Kou is a joint faculty member between biomedical engineering and the Department of Radiology in the School of Medicine. He earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering (specialty bioengineering) and master's degree in computer science, both from North Dakota State University. He spent two years of post-doctorate training in the MR Research Facility at WSU and was promoted as a research assistant professor in radiology in 2008. His research interests include advanced neuron-imaging of traumatic brain injury in both human clinical studies and experimental animal models. Professor Kou is married to Longlong Zhou and has a 3-year-old daughter, Angelina Kou.

Qingyu Yang joined the industrial and systems engineering faculty as an assistant professor in fall 2010. He received a bachelor's degree in automation and a master's degree in intelligent systems from the University of Science and Technology of China, and a master's degree in statistics and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of Iowa. He was a post-doctoral research fellow in the industrial and engineering program at the University of Michigan. Yang's research interests include health care system engineering, information systems, applied statistics, and data mining. He was the recipient of the Best Paper Award from the 2009 Industrial Engineering Research Conference (IERC).

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