This fall, the College of Engineering welcomes six new postdoctoral fellows through the Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, a university-wide initiative. Now in its second year, the program supports talented, highly motivated scholars committed to Notre Dame’s mission—to be a powerful force for good and to advance research solutions for the challenges facing society and our world.
Each fellow is paired with a primary research mentor from the College of Engineering and receives a competitive stipend, along with funding for independent research, training, and professional development.
“Postdoctoral fellows are central to a vibrant research community,” said Patricia J. Culligan, the Matthew H. McCloskey Dean of Engineering. “We are delighted to welcome our latest cohort of fellows, who will be advancing projects in such vital areas as fetal monitoring for hypoxia, sustainable battery storage, and the use of AI to fast-track chemistry that addresses health and energy challenges.”
In addition to individualized mentoring, all fellows will participate in the College of Engineering Postdoctoral Training program, which provides career development training to enhance independent research and leadership skills.
Kevin Greenman
Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Advisor: Brett Savoie, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
“I develop AI methods that learn efficiently from diverse chemical data and make more reliable predictions, helping accelerate molecular and materials discovery for applications in health, energy, and beyond.”
Haisu Kang
Ph.D., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Advisor: Jonathan Whitmer, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
“My research centers on developing computational and theoretical models that establish design principles for safer and more sustainable polymer electrolytes that can be used as next-generation energy-storage materials. By bridging molecular-level phenomena and macroscopic properties, I seek to uncover the fundamental mechanisms governing the performance of materials.”
Yonghyun Albert Kwon
Ph.D., Yonsei University
Advisor: Kai Ni, Electrical Engineering
“I will be engineering advanced semiconductor materials and novel device structures to drive the next generation of computing and storage technologies. My work centers on designing innovative electronic device architectures that break through conventional bottlenecks to support the massive demands of artificial intelligence and universal computing chips.”
Nishat Raihan
Ph.D., George Mason University
Advisor: Joanna Santos, Computer Science and Engineering
“My work brings AI code generation to the programming languages and human languages that today’s models overlook, from low-resource languages to emerging programming languages. I create the datasets, benchmarks, and models that make these tools both capable and safe across diverse communities.”
Jason Yang
Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University
Advisor: Thomas O’Sullivan, Electrical Engineering
“Current childbirth monitors for hypoxia (low oxygen levels) rely on indirect signals like heart rates, leading to massive diagnostic uncertainty and thousands of unnecessary C-sections. To solve this, I am building noninvasive optical sensors that use specialized light to track a fetus’s blood flow, oxygen levels, and metabolism in real time–allowing obstetricians to detect with certainty when manageable oxygen stress shifts to brain-threatening metabolic failure.”
Yanhao Yang
Ph.D., Oregon State University
Advisor: Patrick Wensing, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
“My research focuses on improving the control and motion planning of highly dynamic robots, such as legged, aerial, and bio-inspired robots, so that they can operate effectively in real-world settings, including environmental monitoring and search-and-rescue. I use geometric methods from mechanics, dynamics, and control theory to develop physics-consistent robot-learning approaches that are data-efficient, reliable when encountering uncertainty or disturbances, generalizable across tasks and environments, and explainable for transparent and safe deployment.”
—Mary Hendriksen, Notre Dame Engineering