Director

Dr. Ming Leu, MAE - Dr. Ming Leu is the Keith and Pat Bailey Distinguished Professor in Integrated Product Development and Manufacturing. He has been very active in professional societies, especially ASME. Dr. Leu is well known for his research contributions in CAD/CAM, robotics, rapid prototyping, and intelligent manufacturing. He has received numerous honors and awards, including the AMAE Research Excellence Award (MS&T, 2001), Harlan J. Perlis Research Award (NJIT, 1993), Presidential Young Investigator Award (NSF, 1985), Ralph R. Teetor Education Award (SAE, 1985), Wood Paper Award (FPRS, 1981), and University Lead Award (CASA/SME, 1994). He was elected to ASME Fellow in 1993 and is a member of the Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, and Phi Kappa Phi honor societies. He has over 200 publications in refereed scientific and engineering journals and conference proceedings, and three U.S. patents.

Senior Research Investigators

Dr. Frank Liou, MAE - Dr. Frank Liou is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering Department at Missouri S&T. He also serves as the Director of Interdisciplinary Manufacturing Engineering Program at MST. He is an Associate Journal Editor of Mechanism and Machine Theory, and is also an Associate Editor of SME Journal of Manufacturing Systems. Since he is very active in research, he is a Research Investigator at the Intelligent Systems Center at MS&T.

Dr. Bruce McMillin, Computer Science - Dr. Bruce McMillin is currently a Professor of Computer Science and research investigator in the Intelligent Systems Center at Missouri S&T at Rolla. He leads and participates in interdisciplinary teams in formal methods for fault tolerance and security in distributed embedded systems with an eye towards critical infrastructure protection. His research has been supported by NSF, AFOSR, DOE, and several Missouri Industries. His research interests include fault tolerance, security parallel algorithms, software engineering, and distributed systems theory. Dr. McMillin has authored over 52 refereed papers in international conferences and journals.

Dr. J. Sarangapani, Electrical & Computer Engineering - Dr. Jag Sarangapani is currently an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests include embedded intelligent control, embedded sensor/computer/communication networks, MEMS/prognostics, and autonomous systems/robotics. He currently directs the Embedded Systems and Networking Laboratory. He has co-authored more than 100 refereed conference and juried journal articles, several book chapters and one text book with two forthcoming. He currently holds 17 patents. He is currently serving as the Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology and as an editorial board member for the International Journal of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, and Sigma Xi. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Dr. Don Wunsch, Electrical & Computer Engineering - Dr. Donald Wunsch is the Mary K. Finley Missouri Distinguished Professor of ECE at MS&T, where he has been since 1999. He also has courtesy appointments in Computer Science, Systems Engineering, and Business Administration, and is director of the Applied Computational Intelligence Laboratory. His prior positions were Associate Professor at Texas Tech University, Senior Principal Scientist at Boeing, Consultant for Rockwell International, and Technician for International Laser Systems. His education includes an Executive MBA from Washington University in St. Louis, the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington (Seattle), the M.S. in Applied Mathematics from the same institution, the B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of New Mexico, and he also completed a Humanities Honors Program at Seattle University. He has over 250 publications in his research field of computational intelligence, and has attracted over $5 million in research funding. He has produced seven Ph.D.'s in Electrical Engineering, four in Computer Engineering, and one in Computer Science. He is an IEEE Fellow, a recipient of the Halliburton Award for Excellence in Teaching and Research and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He served as a Board member of the International Neural Networks Society, the University of Missouri Bioinformatics Consortium, the Idaho EPSCOR Project Advisory Board, and the IEEE Neural Networks Council. He also served as Technical Program Co-Chair for IJCNN 02, General Chair for IJCNN 03, and President of the International Neural Networks Society. His research interests are in neural networks, and their applications in: reinforcement learning, approximate dynamic programming, the game of Go, financial engineering, graph theory, risk assessment, representation of knowledge and uncertainty, collective robotics, computer security, critical infrastructure protection, biomedical applications of computational intelligence, telecommunications, and smart sensor networks.

Research Investigators

Dr. Sanjeev Agarwal, Electrical & Computer Engineering- Dr. Agarwal is Research Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Missouri S&T. Dr. Agarwal graduated from Missouri S&T with PhD degree in Electrical Engineering in 1998. He did Integrated Bachelor and Master of Technology in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay, India in 1993. Dr. Agarwal’s research interests include signal and image processing, machine vision, distributed computing, virtual and augmented reality and sensor fusion.

Dr. Venkat Allada, Engineering Management - Dr. Venkat Allada is an Associate Professor of Engineering Management and Director of the Sustainable Design Laboratory at Missouri S&T. His teaching and research interests include intelligent design and manufacturing, product platforms, sustainable product engineering, design for reuse, remanufacturing, and recycle, and lean enterprise systems. He has more than 50 published journal and conference articles including a Best Paper Award at the 2000 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) International DETC- Design for Manufacturing Conference.

Dr. Abdeldjelil "DJ" Belarbi, Civil Engineering - Dr. Abdeldjelil Belarbi is currently a Professor of Civil Engineering at MS&T. He is actively engaged in a broad spectrum of structural engineering research areas. His primary research contributions deal with the constitutive modeling, analytical and experimental investigation of reinforced and prestressed concrete structures as well as research to smart structures and use of FRP composites in civil infrastructure. Dr. Belarbi has published over 80 technical papers in refereed scientific and engineering journals and conference proceedings. Dr. Belarbi is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Concrete Institute and is very active (Member and Chair) on several technical and educational and national committees.

Dr. Ghulam Bham, Civil, Arch & Environ Engr - Dr. Ghulam Bham is an Associate Professor of Civil Engineering. He received his BS in civil engieneering from NAD, in Pakistan, and an M.S. and PhD, both in civil engineering, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Bham's areas of interest include traffic modeling and simulation, traffic flow theory and characteristics, driver and vehicular behavior, pavement management, and GIS applications in transportation engineering.

Dr. K. Chandrashekhara, MAE - Dr. K. Chandrashekhara is a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Missouri S&T, Rolla and the Director of the Composite Manufacturing Laboratory. His research areas are Composite Materials and Structures, Biomaterials, Finite Element Analysis, and Experimental Characterization. He has performed research for Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research, Department of Commerce, Air Force Research Laboratory, National Science Foundation, Department of Transportation, Department of Agriculture, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and several industries. He has published over 150 technical papers including over 60 journal articles. He has received multiple MS&T Faculty Excellence Awards and the recipient of the Academy of Mechanical Engineers Research Excellence Award. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Dr. Badrul Chowdhury, Electrical & Computer Engineering - Dr. Badrul Chowdhury is a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Missouri S&T. His research interests are in power system modeling, analysis and control; power quality; electricity markets in a deregulated era; power electronics; and utility-integration of distributed energy resources. During the past 17 years, Dr. Chowdhury has  managed research projects that have been supported by the US National Science Foundation, Electric Power Research Institute, Sandia National Labs, Bonneville Power Administration, PacifiCorp, Ameren Services, and the US Department of Energy. Dr. Chowdhury has also conducted research on finding sustainable renewable energy solutions. He has managed close to $1M of funds for studies on renewable energy, particularly solar photovoltaics. He has collaborated in this area with the technical staff of the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) and of Sandia National Labs in developing innovative laboratories for studying the effects of distributed power sources. Dr. Chowdhury is the recipient of the 2004 Outstanding Member Award from the IEEE St. Louis Section.

Dr. Xiaoping Du, MAE - Title: Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering - Research and Teaching Are: Design and Manufacturing.Dr. Du is currently an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Missouri S&T. Dr. Du received Ph.D.s in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2002 and from the Southwest Petroleum Institute in 1995. Dr. Du’s research interests include probablistic/statistic methods in engineering design, reliability-based design, robust design, and design of experiments, model validation, design optimization and multidisciplinary design optimization, mechanism analysis and synthesis, and petroleum machinery.

 Dr. Chang-Soo Kim, Electrical & Computer Engineering - Dr. Chang-Soo Kim joined MS&T in 2002 with a joint appointment at the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Biological Sciences. His Intelligent Microsystem Lab (IML) is dedicated to accomplishing functional integration (built-in intelligence) and structural integration (miniaturization) of advanced microsystems. Current research topic includes development of biochemical microdevices (microsensors, microactuators, and microfluidics) and their applications to special environments. The IML is a part of the Intelligence System Center (ISC) and supports one of ISC's emphasis areas; Advanced Simulation, Sensing and Control.

Dr. Robert Landers, MAE - Dr. Landers currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Missouri S&T at Rolla. Previously, he was an assistant research scientist in the Engineering Research Center for Machining Systems at the University of Michigan. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of modeling, analysis, monitoring, and control of manufacturing processes (e.g., metal cutting, friction stir, laser metal deposition, rapid freeze prototyping), control of tribological systems, integrated design and control, and digital control applications. He is also a Research Investigator for the MS&T Intelligent Systems Center, and a faculty member of the Center for Technology Enhanced Learning, Manufacturing Engineering Education Program, and Systems Engineering Program.

Dr. Xiaoqing Frank Liu, Computer Science - Dr. Xiaoqing (Frank) Liu is an associate professor and the director of software engineering laboratory in the Computer Science Department at Missouri S&T. He graduated with a Ph.D. in computer science from Texas A&M University at College Station in 1995. His research interests are in software engineering, fuzzy logic, collaborative and integrated manufacturing, and software engineering application in power systems. He has published about forty referred journal and conference papers in the above areas.

Dr. Sanjay Madria, Computer Science - Dr. Sanjay Kumar Madria received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India in 1995. He is an Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, at Missouri S&T. He has published more than 85 Journal and conference papers in the areas of web data warehousing, mobile databases, nested transaction management and performance issues. He is serving as PC member of various database conferences and workshops and reviewer for many reputed database journals such as IEEE TKDE, IEEE Computer. He received DEXA award for his contribution to E-commerce and Web Data Management research. His research is supported by NSF, DOE and UM research board.

Dr. Rajiv Mishra, Metallurgical Engineering - Dr. Rajiv S. Mishra is an Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Missouri S&T and Director of the Center for Friction Stir Processing. His current research interests include, friction stir welding and processing, processing and properties of ultrafine grained materials (including nanocrystalline), superplastic forming, high temperature mechanical behavior of materials (particularly creep and superplasticity), discontinuously reinforced aluminum composites, and nanophase aluminum alloys. His highest degree is Ph.D. in Metallurgy from the University of Sheffield, UK (1988). He has authored or co-authored 124 papers in peer-reviewed journals and proceedings and has two U.S. patents and filed for two more.

Dr. Anthony Okafor, MAE - Dr. Okafor is currently a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Missouri S&T. Dr. Okafor received a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Mechanics with Major in Manufacturing and Minor in Analytical Mechanics from Michigan Technological University in 1986. He also received an MS degree in Production Management and Manufacturing Technology from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, in 1982, and an MS degree in Mechanical Engineering with specialization in Machine Tool Design and Production from the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria in 1980. His teaching and research interests are in Manufacturing including intelligent machining, high speed machining, machine tool dynamics and metrology, sensors and signal processing, Computer Numerical Control (CNC), and neural network applications; Smart Structures including Structural Health Monitoring and Non-Destructive Testing & Evaluation. His current research is in Advanced NDE Development for Bonded Repair of Aging Aircraft, Multi-Modal NDE Development for Corrosion Detection and Analysis; and high speed machining of monolithic thin-walled titanium aerospace components.

Dr. Kent Peaslee, Metallurgical Engineering - Dr. Kent Peaslee is an Associate Professor of Metallurgical Engineering at Missouri S&T. His research interests are liquid metal processing, environmental aspects of metals manufacturing, materials recycling, and steelmaking and casting. Kent has formed several research consortiums with integrated steelmaker, mini-mills, and steel foundries to solve common environmental, melting, casting, and processing problems. He has authored or co-authored over 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals and proceedings.

Dr. Sahra Sedigh, Electrical & Computer Engineering- Dr. Sedigh received the B.S. degree from Sharif University of Technology and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University, all in electrical engineering. She is currently an assistant professor with the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Information Science and Technology at Missouri S&T. She worked for Cisco Systems from May 1997 to May 2000. Dr. Sedigh held a Purdue Research Foundation Fellowship from 1996 to 2000, and is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, IEEE, ACM, and ASEE. Her research interests include software quality, intelligent infrastructures, and safety-critical software.

  Dr. Shun Takai, Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Engineering- Dr. Takai is an assistant Professor of the Department of Interdisciplinary Engineering at Missouri S&T.  He received a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 2005.  Dr. Takai's research interests are in the area of product/system design and lifecycle engineering.  His research goal is to develop interdisciplinary design/design for X methodologies that integrate marketing, statistics, microeconomics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence and decision science with design engineering."

Dr. Daniel Tauritz, Computer Science – Dr. Daniel R. Tauritz is Associate Professor with Tenure of Computer Science at Missouri S&T, Director of the Natural Computation Laboratory (http://web.mst.edu/~tauritzd/nc-lab/), Research Investigator in the Intelligent Systems Center (http://isc.mst.edu/), and a Collaborator in the Energy Research & Development Center (http://energy.mst.edu/).  He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Leiden University in 2002.  His primary research interest is in Evolutionary computing, both the design of novel types of Evolutionary Algorithms and their application to real-world problem solving in areas such as Critical Infrastructure Protection (coevolutionary armsraces for hardening electric power transmission systems), Automated Software Engineering (coevolving test cases and software artifacts), Intrusion Detection Systems (evolving rule sets), and Inverse Diffusion Analysis (employing Genetic programming).  His long-term research goal is to create parameterless, autonomous Evolutionary Algorithms which require no parameter tuning by users and which employ an autonomous control structure.  Such structures have the potential to autonomously regulate population dynamics via emergent behavior rather than the centralized control structures traditionally employed by Evolutionary Algorithms.

Dr. Hai-Lung Tsai, MAE - Dr. Tsai is a professor of mechanical engineering. He received a Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. He joined MS&T in 1986 after working with the General Motors Research Laboratories (GMR), Warren, Michigan. Dr. Tsai has a broad interest in all aspects of basic and applied research in laser-based macro and micro manufacturing and materials processing, including laser welding, hybrid laser-MIG welding, and ultrafast laser micromachining. Dr. Tsai is an internationally well-known expert in mathematical modeling of welding and laser welding processes. Three times Dr. Tsai received the Best Paper Award from the American Foundry Society and a prestigious “Marcus A. Grossmann Award” from ASM International for the Best Paper published in Metallurgical Transactions, 1994. He is also the recipient of four awards related to teaching excellence. Dr. Tsai has published over 80 refereed journal and conference articles and has received over $5.7M in research grants/contracts sponsored by federal agencies and industry. He is the co-inventor of five US patents.

Dr. Ganesh K. Venayagamoorthy, Electrical & Computer Engineering - Dr. Venayagamoorthy received his PhD from the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa in Feb. 2002. He joined Missouri S&T as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in May 2002. Dr. Venayagamoorthy directs the Real-Time Power and Intelligent Systems (RTPIS) laboratory (http://rtpis.mst.edu) at MS&T and his research interests are in computational intelligence, power systems stability and control, evolvable hardware and signal processing. He has published over 150 papers in refereed journals and international conferences, 3 book chapters and edited 2 books. Dr. Venayagamoorthy is the recipient of the following awards: a 2004 NSF CAREER Award, the 2005 IEEE Industry Applications Society Outstanding Young Member Award, the 2005 South African Institute of Electrical Engineers Young Achievers Award, 2004 IEEE St. Louis Section Outstanding Young Engineer Award, the 2003 International Neural Network Society (INNS) Young Investigator Award, a 2001 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) summer research scholarship and five prize paper awards with the IEEE Industry Application Society (IAS) and IEEE CIS. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, the IEEE St. Louis CIS and IAS Chapter Chairs, the Chair of the task force on Intelligent Control Systems and the Secretary of the Intelligent Systems subcommittee of IEEE Power Engineering Society.

Dr. Yangchuan Xing, Chemical Engineering - Dr. Xing is currently an assistant professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering and an adjunct assistant professor of Materials & Engineering at Missouri S&T. He is also on the faculty of the Manufacturing Engineering Program at MS&T. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from Yale University in 1998. He was a postdoctoral fellow / associate research scientist at Johns Hopkins University. His current research interest focuses on the synthesis, processing, and characterization of novel nanomaterials with applications in energy conversion and environmental remediation. Current projects include nanostructured electrodes for micro fuel cells, nanostructured fuel cell catalysts, hydrogen storage nanocomposites, shape controlled formation of iron oxide nanoparticles, and self-assembly of nanoparticle superlattices.Dr. Xing is affiliated with the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), American Chemical Society (ACS), The Electrochemical Society, The Materials Research Society (MRS), and Sigma Xi.

 Dr. Yahong Rosa Zheng, EE -Dr. Zheng received a B.S. degree from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China, in 1987, and the M.S. degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1989, both in electrical engineering. She received the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, in 2002. She was an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow from Jan. 2003 to April, 2005 at University of Missouri-Columbia. Currently, she is an assistant professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Missouri S&T. Her research interests include array signal processing, wireless communications, and wireless sensor networks. She has served as a Technical Program Committee (TPC) member for several IEEE International Conferences. She is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

Affiliated Members

Dr. Levent Acar, Electrical & Computer Engineering - Dr. Acar is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Missouri S&T. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1988 from the Ohio State University at Columbus. Dr. Acar’s technical areas of interest are intelligent control of functional systems, neural networks with applications to control, hierarchical design and control of large-scale systems, optimal and suboptimal Control for interconnected systems, and distributed computational methods of optimal control strategies.

Dr. Waleed Al-Assadi, EE - Dr. Al-Assadi is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. His research interests are in VLSI Design, Design for Test, CAD tools, embedded systems and computer architecture. He has worked for 6 years with IBM as a leading Design for Test for the IBM PowerPC embedded processors. He has two US patents in VLSI systems.

 Dr.Sriram Chellappan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.  His broad research interests are in the areas of Network Security, Wireless networks and Distributed Systems.  Particularly, he has worked on problems in mobility assisted wireless sensor networks deployment, secure key management in sensor networks, active worms propagation and intelligent denial of service attacks on overlay systems, and network congestion control.  Sriram received the Ph.D. Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Ohio State University in December 2007.

 Dr. Mehdi Ferdowsi received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago, USA in 2004. In August 2004 he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Missouri-Rolla (UMR), where he is currently an assistant professor. He has more than 25 publications in the areas of multi-input converters, multi-level converters, battery charge equalization techniques, hybrid vehicles, and digital control. His current research is focused on integration of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles with electric power grid, while they both share the same energy storage system, under a current NSF CAREER grant titled “Vehicle Fleet as a Distributed Energy Storage System for the Power Grid”. Dr. Ferdowsi has received UMR Outstanding Teaching Award in the 2005-2006 academic year. Dr. Ferdowsi is a member of IEEE and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.

Dr. Mariesa Crow, Electrical & Computer Engineering- Dr. Mariesa Louise Crow is the Dean, School of Materials, Energy and Earth Resources. Her area of professional interest is bulk power transmission systems analysis and security. She is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and served as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Affairs in the School of Engineering from 2000-2003 before accepting her current position. She has authored a book, over 100 articles, and has participated in research projects totaling over $8 million in the past 10 years. She served as Vice President for Education and Industry Relations of the IEEE/PES Society from 2002-2004. She is a Registered Professional Engineer in the State of Missouri.

 Dr. Zhen Liu, Assistant Professor of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at Missouri S&T.  He received his Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences from Northwestern University in 2007. His primary research interests are dynamic decision-making under uncertainties and applications, such as energy and healthcare related applications, financial engineering and computational finance, and modeling and numerical solutions for portfolio optimization problems. He is a member of INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences).

 Dr. Lifeng Zhang received his Ph.D. in 1998, and currently is an assistant professor at MSE, Missouri S&T.  He had 10 years research work in Japan, Germany, US and Norway.  Before coming to Missouri S&T, he was a full professor at Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Norwegian University of Science & Technology.  Lifeng has compound backgrounds in primary production, refining, (continuous) casting, and recycling of metals (steel, aluminum), computational fluid dynamics application to metallurgical systems (multiphase fluid flow, particle motion, heat transfer and solidification), recycling of solar cell silicon and electronic wastes.  Lifeng has published more than 100 papers and made more than 80 international presentations.  He was also the Winner of the 2001 Steelmaking Conference Award of the Iron and Steel Society (ISS), TMS2007 Young Leader.  He is a member of AIST, TMS and ISIJ.