Faculty Affairs

2024 Promotion Awardees

PROFESSOR

Dr. Srinivas Katkoori teaches and conducts research in the broad areas of VLSI design automation, cybersecurity, and Internet-of-Things (IoT). To date, Dr. Katkoori has directed 19 doctoral dissertations and 44 MS Theses and published over 160 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers.  Dr. Katkoori obtained competitive research funding $9M+ funded by NSF, DoD, MDA, NASA, FL DOT, etc. Eight (8) peer-reviewed international conference papers were nominated for the best paper recognition with four (4) papers recognized at IEEE iSES 2023, IEEE iSES 2022, IFIP IoT 2021, and IEEE iSES 2020. Dr. Katkoori served/serving as ACM SIGDA Board Treasurer, Vice-Chair of IFIPWG 10.5, Chair of IFIP IoT committee and AE of IEEE Transactions on VLSI, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, IEEE Embedded Systems Journal, Springer Nature CS (IoT Section), Integration VLSI Journal, etc. He is/was the General Chair and Program Chair of several international conferences (IEEE ISES, IFIP IoT, GLSVLSI, ISVLSI, ICCE, etc.). Dr. Katkoori received 2007 USF Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award, 2013 USF Krivanek Distinguished Teacher Award, 2005 IEEE-USA Professional Achievement Award, 2003 USF Outstanding Faculty Research Achievement Award. He is a Senior member of ACM and IEEE.  As per Google Scholar (07/2024), he has 3,234 citations (h-index 25 and i10-index 60).

Dr. Yao Liu is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida. She received her Ph.D in Computer Science from North Carolina State University in 2012. Dr. Liu has been active in serving in the organization and technical program committees in premier network and security conferences, including ACSAC, CCS, CNS, INFOCOM, NDSS, S&P, USENIX Security, and WiSec. She has also been in the editorial boards of leading academic journals, including IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security. Dr. Liu is an NSF CAREER Award recipient in 2016. She received USF Outstanding Research Achievement Award in 2017. She also received the ACM CCS Test-of-Time Award by ACM SIGSAC in 2019.

Dr. David S. Simmons is a Professor of Chemical, Biological, and Materials Engineering at the University of South Florida. His research group at USF combines computer simulations, machine learning, theory, evolutionary algorithms, and experiments to design and understand polymers and other next-generation advanced materials. Major research areas in the Simmons group include nanomaterials with advanced properties for applications ranging from next-generation batteries to ultra-tough tires, sequence-specified synthetic polymers that ‘import’ the chemical control of biological molecules into synthetic materials, and the physics of the glass transition – a poorly understood process through which a large fraction of engineering materials solidify without crystallizing. Dr. Simmons earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Florida before completing his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He then completed a National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and spent six years on the faculty of the Department of Polymer Engineering at the University of Akron, before joining the University of South Florida in 2018. Beginning in August 2024, Dr. Simmons serves as President of the USF Faculty Senate.

Dr. Arash Takshi graduated in Electronics from Amir Kabir University of Technology in Iran in 1993. He received his M.Sc. in Analog Electronics from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran in 1996. During his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, UBC, Canada, he worked in the field of Organic Electronics. After his graduation, from 2007 to 2009, he was a postdoc fellow at UBC working on biological-based photovoltaic devices. Shortly before joining USF in 2010, Takshi was a Research Assistant at the University of Maryland, where he collaborated with a research group to develop an energy harvesting system for wireless sensors.

Since 2010, Takshi’s research group at USF (Bio-Organic Electronics Lab) has been active in the field of advanced energy materials, using conducting polymers, perovskite, and nanomaterials (Ag NW, ZnO NW, TiO2 nanoparticle, graphene, MoS2) for energy conversion, energy storage, wearable electronics, and chemical sensor applications. His research activities cover materials synthesis, device fabrication, characterization, and optimization. He has more than 100 publications in scientific journals and conference proceedings. Also, he has received over $2M in research grants during his work as an Assistant and Associate Professor at USF. Additionally, he has been the inventor of several patents related to the technologies being developed in his lab. In 2024, Takshi was promoted to a full professor.

Associate Professor

Dr. Shaun Canavan received his PhD in Computer Science from Binghamton University in New York. He is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on Affective Computing, Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition,  and Human-Computer Interaction. He has over 60 publications in top conferences and journals such as CVPR, ICPR, ICMI, ACII, FG, Pattern Recognition Letters, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, and IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. He was the program chair for Face and Gesture 2024, and the publications chair for Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, 2023. He is the current general chair for FG 2025, and tutorial chair for ACII 2024. He is an associate editor for Pattern Recognition and Pattern Recognition Letters. His work has been supported by the DIA, Army, IARPA, NSF, and Amazon. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the AAAC.

 

Robert Karam

Coming Soon

 

 

Dr. Albert Kim earned a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2008, 2011, and 2015. From 2015 to 2017, he joined Intel Corp. as an R&D engineer. Prior to his current position, he was an Assistant Professor of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Temple University (2017-2022). His research interests are in a range of clinically promising smart implantable biomedical microdevice system that combines acoustic waves, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and nanotechnology, flexible bioelectronics, and/or machine learning-enabled systems. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Health (NIH), and the Florida Department of Health, a total of over $8M. As a faculty member, Dr. A. Kim received the most prestigious award, the NSF CAREER Award, in 2022. He is also a full member of Sigma Xi.

 

John Licato, PhD is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at USF, Director of the USF Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning (AMHR) Lab, and founder of AI startup Actualization AI, LLC. Originally from Wahiawa, Hawaii, he earned his PhD in 2015 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY. He started at USF in 2017, establishing the AMHR lab. He designed and teaches the natural language processing course (NLP is the field that created ChatGPT) at USF, and his lab's mission is to not only make AI smarter, but to use those advances to make people reason better as well. His research expertise lies in AI, NLP, human reasoning, cognitive modeling, and legal / regulatory reasoning, with over 100 peer-reviewed publications. He regularly gives talks and interviews on how to responsibly approach AI in industry, and he has been featured in outlets such as NPR's Marketplace Tech, ABC Action News, and the Tampa Bay Business Journal.

Dr. Mia Naeini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of South Florida. She earned her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a minor in Mathematics, from the University of New Mexico in 2014. Her research interests include leveraging network science, stochastic processes, graph signal processing and machine learning to integrate security and reliability measures into the design and control of cyber physical systems with a focus on smart grids. Her research has received support from various funding agencies including National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and Florida Center for Cybersecurity. In 2023, she received the prestigious NSF CAREER award. She is a senior member of IEEE and has served as the associate editor of the IEEE Communication Letters and as the chair and technical program committee member of several workshops and conferences in the area of power and communication systems.

Dr. Tempestt Neal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of South Florida. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Florida (Computer Engineering, 2018), M.S. from Clemson University (Computer Science, 2014), and a B.S. from South Carolina State University (Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics, 2012). She leads the Cyber Identity and Behavior Research (CIBeR) Lab, which conducts both quantitative and qualitative research on mobile-based sensing for biometrics and human behavior understanding in interdisciplinary applications. In addition, the lab focuses on cybersecurity awareness among populations historically underrepresented in science and engineering. Dr. Neal is also a faculty researcher within CSE’s Natural Language Processing Group, where her research includes the study of linguistic cues as a cognitive biometric trait and implicit opinion mining tasks.

Dr. Neal has held numerous roles in her professional service. She is the Program Chair for the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (IEEE FG 2025) and serves on the IEEE Biometrics Council Education Committee. Previously, she was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Biometrics Council Newsletter and a Guest Editor for the MDPI Electronics Special Issue on Recent Advances in Biometric Security in IoT Based on Machine Learning. Dr. Neal has been an active member of organizing committees for several workshops in Artificial Intelligence and Biometrics, including the Workshops on Applied Multimodal Affect Recognition (AMAR 2020, AMAR 2021, AMAR 2022) and the Workshop on Interdisciplinary Applications of Identity Science and Biometrics. She was a recipient of the University of Florida’s Delores Auzenne Dissertation Award and the National Science Foundation’s CyberCorps Scholarship for Service Fellowship. She was also recognized as a 2021-2022 McKnight Junior Faculty Fellow and received an NSF CAREER Award in 2023.

Professor of Instruction

Dr. Alexandro Castellanos received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from University of South Florida in 2006. He is a faculty member in the Electrical Engineering Department at University of South Florida. His research interests lie in the area of cyber physical systems, embedded systems, Internet of things (IoT) and control theory for industrial applications in the areas of Mechatronics, Robotics and Industrial Automation.  

Dr. Castellanos has 25 plus years of distinguished research, education, and service experience. He has been awarded with the "Latin Faculty of the year 2018", and the “Kosove’s distinguished teaching and service 2023 award” from the University of South Florida. His academic activities include collaboration with institutions in Latin America and Europe. He’s been published in IEEE Spectrum.  

Associate Professor of Instruction

Dr. Jim Anderson received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. He then went on an earned an MBA from The University Of Texas, Dallas. He has published over 125 books including CRC Press's "Software Defined Networking". Jim has worked for 16 different companies during his 33 year career including startups as well as Boeing, Siemens, Alcatel, Verizon, AAA, and Amgen. He has had opportunities to teach at Florida Atlantic University, Florida Polytechnic University, and The University of South Florida. Despite his busy work schedule, Jim has been able to publish 5 papers and has been an invited speaker 8 times. Jim has been an active member of the IEEE for over 30 years, is a senior member, and has held numerous leadership positions at both the local and regional level.

Dr. Jamie Chilton is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF) (Tampa, FL). She received her BA in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Agnes Scott College (Decatur, GA) and her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology (GT) and Emory University (Atlanta, GA). Dr. Chilton has 20+ years of experience in a variety of research, technology, business, teaching and consulting roles in higher education, government, and the biotech industry. Her previous biotech project management work received multiple grant awards to develop innovative cell culture systems for disease modeling and drug discovery for academic, government, large biotech, and pharmaceutical clients. As a professor, Dr. Chilton is deeply passionate about instilling a systems thinking mindset in her students and enhancing their career development both in and out of the classroom. Her current research focuses on engineering management and engineering education. Dr. Chilton currently serves as Co-Faculty Lead of USF’s first Engineering Education Abroad Program, Program Director for COE’s Interns Present Scholarship Program, and Co-Faculty Advisor for USF’s Chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). Dr. Chilton resides in the Tampa Bay area, loves to garden, and takes every opportunity to travel and embark on outdoor adventures with her family.

Dr. Goni Rodrigo studied Mechanical Engineering at the Public University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain. He then continued his education by pursuing a Masters degree also in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston RI. This was a thesis Masters that involved research in the field of solid mechanics. Dr. Goni Rodrigo studied sound propagation in particulate composites consisting of spherical ceramic particles embedded in a polymer matrix. After that, Dr. Goni Rodrigo pursued a PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering at Boston University, Boston MA. This time he switched to the energy field studying conductive heat transfer in electronic devices at the nano and micro scales. He joined the University of South Florida in 2018 where he has been a professor of instruction in the department of Mechanical Engineering. He has taught multiple courses such as: thermodynamics, thermal systems, instrumentation, programming, numerical analysis, foundations and machine design.