Welcome! New faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering

Collage featuring Cao, Ghosh, and Ozkan-Aydin

The Department of Electrical Engineering is very pleased to introduce three new members of the faculty.

Ningyuan Cao joins the department as Assistant Professor.

Cao’s research is primarily focused on the interplay between advanced hardware design and real-time/low-power machine learning applications.

He explores custom analog/mixed-signal circuit, digital architecture, and micro-system design for machine learning acceleration and distributed intelligence and custom IC design automation with data-driven methods. This work has applications to next-generation internet-of-everything, tactile internet, and mixed reality.

Cao received his M.S. in electrical engineering from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in electrical and electronic engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral researcher at IBM and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Monisha Ghosh joins the department in January 2022 as Professor. Her work spans industry, government, and academia.

She recently completed a term as the Chief Technology Officer at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), where she was involved in setting national strategy and technology specifications related to the explosive growth of broadband wireless communications technologies.

She also has served in the National Science Foundation as a rotating Program Director (IPA) within the Directorate of Computer & Information Science and Engineering (CISE) where she managed wireless networking research. At the NSF, she initiated one of the first large-scale programs that targets applications of machine learning to wireless networks.

From 2015 to 2021, she was a research professor at the University of Chicago, where she conducted research on wireless technologies for the 5G cellular, next-generation Wi-Fi systems, IoT, coexistence, and spectrum sharing. She also has worked in industrial research and development at Interdigital, Philips Research, and Bell Laboratories on wireless systems such as the HDTV broadcast standard, cable standardization, and cognitive radio for the TV White Spaces.

She is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin joins the department as Assistant Professor.

Her research lies at the intersection of robotics, biology, and computer science. She focuses on understanding the factors (body morphology, physical interactions, etc.) that play a key role in animals’ locomotion and developing predictable, precise, and robust robotic systems that can move across unpredictable, complex terrains as skillfully as biological organisms. In particular, she is interested in soft robotics, bio-inspired design, and swarm robotics.

Ozkan-Aydin joins us from Georgia Tech, where she was a research associate. She received her Ph.D. in electrical and electronics engineering from METU in Turkey.

“We’re pleased to be starting the new academic year with these extraordinary new members of the faculty,” said Greg Snider, professor and chair of electrical engineering.

“The strengths they bring — from innovative, leading-edge research to deep experience and connections in industry and government — will take our work in electrical engineering to new heights and benefit Notre Dame students at every level.”