New Hires Add Teaching, Research Talent to Engineering Faculty

Drexel Engineering is pleased to announce the onboarding of six new teaching faculty for the 2023 academic year. These accomplished engineers will bring valuable expertise and enthusiasm that will enrich the learning experience in the college.

Carlo Ciliberti, PhD, joined the engineering, leadership and society faculty on January 1 as associate teaching professor. He holds a PhD in engineering management from Drexel and had previously developed undergraduate engineering and construction management courses at Rowan University and graduate engineering management courses at the University of Nebraska. He carries over 30 years of industry experience as a project engineer and lead control systems engineer at Fluor Daniel, CDI Engineering, and Gannett Fleming.

Donald Fehlinger, PhD; Neda KaramiMohammadi, PhD; and Liang Zhang, PhD, join the engineering, leadership and society faculty as assistant teaching professors.

Fehlinger earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering at Drexel. His doctoral research focused on fluid and thermodynamics, and as a post-doc he has co-published two conference papers for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers on increasing high schoolers’ interest in STEM.

KaramiMohammadi earned her doctoral degree in mechanical engineering and has been working as a research associate in that department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has studied nonlinear dynamics, vibrations and control, uncertainty quantification, stochastic process and control, state estimation for nonlinear systems, control of unmanned ground vehicles, and energy harvesting. She has previously led courses in applied dynamics, applied mechanics and modeling of engineering systems.

Zhang completed his doctorate at the University of Arizona, studying systems and industrial engineering. His research focused intelligent transportation systems, machine learning, traffic operations, transportation network analysis, and traffic data analysis. He has led classes on engineering management, traffic flow theory and simulation modeling and analysis.

Adams Rackes, PhD, joins as assistant teaching professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering. Rackes holds three degrees, including his doctoral degree, from Drexel, and an undergraduate degree from Harvard. His doctoral research centered on using machine learning and optimization techniques to enable smarter ventilation control in commercial buildings, to both save energy and improve indoor air quality. In 2015, he earned a Fulbright scholarship to study building ventilation in Brazil.

Somayeh Keshavarz joins as an assistant teaching professor of electrical and computer engineering. Keshavaraz holds master’s degrees in electrical and electronics engineering from Shahrood University of Technology in Iran and in computer science from the University of Central Florida. She is currently completing her doctoral degree at Temple University. She has previously taught courses in machine learning, computer vision, data science, and related subjects.

Additionally, two tenure track faculty will join the college starting in September 2024. The additions are part of Drexel’s cluster hiring initiative, which seeks to recruit highly interdisciplinary faculty who will catalyze collaboration across departments and colleges to address global issues.

Amanda Carneiro Marques will join the civil, architectural and environmental engineering faculty as an assistant professor. Marques is currently pursuing her PhD in environmental and water resources engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She received her master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering from Rio de Janeiro Federal University, Brazil, where she studied water demand and supply projections under climate change scenarios, proposing sustainable ways to manage multiple water uses and developing strategies to ensure water availability for future generations. Besides quantity, water quality is also an important component to investigate within sustainable water resources systems. Thus, her research at UMass Amherst focus on employing long-term data assessment, novel environmental tracers, and modeling to assess drinking water supply quality to support decision-making.

Matthew McDonald, PhD, will join the chemical and biological engineering faculty as assistant professor. He earned his doctoral degree from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and performed postdoctoral work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on separation processes and how combining first principles, high-throughput experimentation, and data science to improve the efficacy of challenging processes or enable entirely new separations altogether. In particular, his work focuses on using crystallization and the interactions of molecular recognition to remove sparse materials from bulk phases, be they potent impurities in pharmaceuticals or dilute pollutants in wastewater.