Principal Investigator
Dr. Jun Jiao: PI and Professor of Physics
Dr. Jun Jiao holds an M.S. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Arizona, and is currently a professor of physics and electrical and computer engineering. She is also the director of the Center for Electron Microscopy and Nanofabrication at Portland State University (PSU). Dr. Jiao's principal research interests concern nanoscale materials and the application of analytical techniques of electron microscopy. Since joining PSU in 1999, Dr. Jiao has successfully initiated several major research activities that have provided a strong foundation for her own research as well as for research and education at PSU. Her devotion to undergraduate research and education includes advising more than 90 undergraduates on NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) projects during summers at PSU, and involving high school students in cutting-edge nanoscience research – earning her recognition as the Outstanding Mentor of 2003-04 by Siemens Westinghouse Competition of Math, Science, and Technology.
Mechanical & Materials Engineering (MME)
Dr. Sung Yi
Dr. Sung Yi is currently a professor in the Mechanical and Material Engineering Department of the Portland State University, OR. He received his Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992. From March 2006 to January 2009, he was a vice president at Manufacturing Engineering, R&D Institute, Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co., LTD, Suwon-City, Gyunggi-Do, Korea. He was also a Singapore-MIT Alliance Fellow from 1998 to 2002. His primary teaching and research interests lie in the areas of microelectronics packaging, MEMS, optimization of manufacturing process of polymeric composites or plastic IC packages, delamination and failure mechanisms of laminated composites and thin films, constitutive modeling and characterization of engineering materials, smart structures, computational mechanics, etc. Dr. Yi has published more than 190 papers in various journals and conference proceedings and his work has been well accepted by the industry and academic community. He is an editorial advisory board member for the Journals of Soldering and Surface Mount Technology He served as an editorial board member for the Journal of Finite Elements in Analysis and Design from 2000 to 2004. He also served as an associate editor for ASME: Journal of Electronic Packaging. He has been served as an international advisory committee member for various international conferences and symposiums. He received the Jefferson Goblet Paper Award at the 32nd SDM Conference in 1991 and the Roger A. Strehlow Memorial Award from UIUC in 1992, respectively. He also received Hedong Technology award in 2007.
Dr. Alexander Hunt
Dr. Alexander Hunt is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Portland State University. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University with a dissertation entitled, “Neurologically based control for quadruped walking.” His research focuses on making robotic systems more adaptable by applying principles learned from biology. Dr. Hunt is especially interested in locomotion and neural control of movement in animals and humans. Previously he was a postdoctoral scholar at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center. where his work involved the improvement of assistive standing technologies for people with spinal cord injuries and lower leg paraplegia. His previous research also includes the design and construction of a robot for use in urban search and rescue as well as a project in 3D metal printing using a Laser Hot Wire (LHW).
Dr. Elliott Gall
Dr. Elliott Gall is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Portland State University. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin and conducted postdoctoral research in Singapore at the Nanyang Technological University. At PSU, he directs the Green Building Research Laboratory (GBRL, https://www.pdx.edu/green-building/) and is a faculty fellow of the PSU Institute for Sustainable Solutions. His main area of research is building science and indoor environmental quality. His research emphasizes understanding heat and mass flows in built environments and designing low-energy interventions that improve indoor environmental quality and building energy-efficiency. This understanding is critical to advance sustainability goals, as buildings consume 41% of the primary energy produced in the United States. We also spend approximately 90% of each day indoors, implying indoor spaces are a key pathway for exposure to air pollution. A variety of approaches are employed to investigate these issues in the GBRL, including bench-scale laboratory studies of air pollutant transport and transformation, building energy modeling, field measurement campaigns, and low-cost sensor design and development for personal exposure studies and smart building applications.
Dr. Rául Bayóan Cal
Dr. Raúl Bayoán Cal is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Portland State University. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY in 2006. His area of research is focused on understanding hydrodynamic turbulence and complexity in fluid mechanics. Emphasis is placed on topics such as interactions of wind turbine arrays and urban canopies with the atmospheric boundary layer, volcanic plumes, as well as external effects on the turbulent boundary layer. Experimental techniques such as particle image velocimetry, laser Doppler velocimetry and hot-wire anemometry are used to quantify such flows in scaled environments.
Dr. Mark Weislogel
Dr. Weislogel teaches Applied Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics at Portland State University. His particular interests focus on analytical and experimental research of capillary dominated flows, particularly those occurring aboard spacecraft. He has performed numerous experiments aboard shuttles, space stations and in NASA and now PSU drop towers. Dr. Weislogel's work has been published in numerous journals and is highly relevant to advanced life support systems for spacecraft.
civil and environmental engineering
Dr. Miguel Figliozzi
Dr. Miguel Figliozzi (https://www.pdx.edu/transportation-lab/) is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the director of the Transportation Technology and People lab. Dr. Figliozzi’s principal research interests are modeling, analysis, and optimization of transportation systems with a focus on new vehicle technologies, active transportation, traffic and public transit operations, freight and logistics, and air quality and emissions modeling. Dr. Figliozzi works in partnership with local, regional, state, and federal transportation agencies, organizations, and private companies. Dr. Figliozzi is also a member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Network Modeling Committee and Transportation and Logistics Committee. He is the faculty advisor of the ITE PSU student chapter and faculty advisor for PSU LSAMP chapter.
Dr. Thomas Schumacher
Dr. Schumacher's is currently an Associate Professor of Structural Engineering, and his primary research interests are in the area of non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of civil infrastructure. In particular, he is interested in stress wave and vibration-based methods such as acoustic emission and ultrasonic monitoring and impulse response testing, respectively. Additionally, he has been collaborating with faculty at the University of Delaware to develop a novel distributed carbon nanotube (CNT)-based sensor that can be integrated with structural composites to form a self-sensing reinforcement to repair and rehabilitate concrete and steel structures. Finally, he is interested in video-based sensing techniques to monitor structural motion. His additional research interests include the behavior and durability of concrete structures, structures subject to extreme events, bridge engineering, data analysis and signal processing, and asset management.
Electrical and computer engineering
Dr. Christof Teushcer
Dr. Teuscher is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Teuscher obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 2000 and 2004 respectively. In 2004 he became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in 2005 a distinguished Director's Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and in 2007 a Technical Staff Member. His main research focuses on next-generation computing architectures and paradigms. For more information visit: http://www.teuscher-lab.com.
Geology
Dr. Andrew Fountain
Dr. Fountain earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He is interested in understanding the basic physical laws that control processes on the Earth’s surface and, although a wide variety of topics interest him, his focus is on ice, particularly glacier ice. His background in the subject started with ice crystals in the atmosphere, became grounded in lake ice, switched to sea ice, and then he found a job…in glaciers. He’s remained there ever since. His research is devoted to the problem of water and glaciers, and the variation of glaciers with climate, which affords him the pleasure of collaborating with some great people in a close community of scientists. Dr. Fountain also has led research projects in Sweden and Alaska. Currently, he is leading a project on glacier change in the western United States. "In Sweden and here in the West, glaciers are retreating like crazy," he notes. "We are seeking to understand the processes causing this change and how they might tie into patterns of global warming.
biology
Dr. Michael Bartlett
Dr. Bartlett received his Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997. He was then an NIH postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and joined the Portland State University biology faculty in 2002. His research concerns the function of basal transcription factors and RNA polymerase from the Archaeal domain and has been funded by the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Jeffrey Singer
Dr. Jeffrey Singer received a BS in Biology from the University of Oregon in 1983, an MS in Cell Biology from University of New Mexico School of Medicine in 1987 and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Utah School of Medicine. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, 1996-2001. He taught at Brown University before moving to Portland in 2008 where he is Associate Professor of Biology at Portland State University. Singer also teaches part-time at OHSU’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and is a member of the Knight Cancer Institute, Cancer Biology Program at OHSU. Dr. Singer has published and coauthored at least twenty-five articles in peer-reviewed journals and has also authored a number of book chapters and abstracts. He has received numerous grants and has presented extensively. He is a faculty mentor to undergraduates, graduates, and post-doctoral fellows.
Dr. Kenneth Stedman
Dr. Stedman has been teaching and researching extreme viruses at PSU since 2001. Dr. Stedman's research focuses on structure, function, biochemistry, evolution and genetics of viruses from extreme environments. Recently his research has expanded into vaccine stabilization.
Chemistry
Dr. Andrea Goforth
Dr. Goforth joined the chemistry faculty at Portland State University in August of 2008 after a joint post-doctoral appointment with the Departments of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Davis. She is a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Careers at the Scientific Interface award recipient and an Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI) Signature Research Fellow. Dr. Goforth also has interests in solid-state and materials chemistry, and the application of inorganic nanoparticles for technological applications, e.g., device miniaturization.
Theresa McCormick
Dr. McCormick earned her Ph.D. from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She held an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Rochester in the Eisenberg group studying artificial photosynthesis, and then went back to Canada to study organic electronic materials at the University of Toronto with Dr. Seferos. Dr. McCormick is interested in solar energy solutions. Since starting at PSU in September 2013, her lab has been focused on making new molecules that can harness the power of the sun.
Robert Strogin
Dr. Strongin earned his doctorate in Organic Chemistry under the guidance of Professor Amos B. Smith, III at the University of Pennsylvania where his graduate research led to co-authorship of thirty peer-reviewed publications. After earning his doctorate, he began his first faculty appointment at Louisiana State University where he was the Phillip and Foymae Kelso West Distinguished Professor (1995-2006) and was named an Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator in 1998. He has won several other research and teaching awards and established the LSU Initiative for Maximizing Student Diversity (IMSD) Program for training underrepresented groups in biomedical research. His major interests and expertise are in functional materials design via physical organic and synthetic organic chemistry principles. He specializes in the design and evaluation of new materials as selective probes and chemosensors to address materials, bioorganic, and biomedical problems.
Reuben Simoyi
Dr. Reuben H. Simoyi was born and raised in Zimbabwe and did his undergraduate education in Nigeria, at the University of Ife. He did his doctoral studies at Brandeis University, Boston, Mass; under the joint supervisions of Professors Kenneth Kustin and Irving R. Epstein. He then did his postdoctoral training in Condensed Matter Physics In the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics at the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Professor Harry Swinney. After a short stint in his native Zimbabwe, he returned to the USA via West Virginia University as professor of Chemistry. He joined Portland State University in the Fall of 2002.
Physics
Dr. Erik Sánchez
Dr. Sánchez earned his Ph.D. at the Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL) in Near-Field Microscopy (ESR/Physics) while attending Portland State University. After graduating, he continued at Harvard University in the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department. Dr. Sánchez's Nano-Development Lab focuses on the development and implementation of nano-scale imaging techniques. His current research encompasses a variety of fields including Near Field optics, Charged Beam technology, and 3D FDTD Electromagnetic Modeling.
Dr. Raj Solanki
After receiving his Ph.D. from Colorado State University, Dr. Solanki was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a professor in the Department of Physics and has a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Portland State University. His research has covered several aspects of optics and electronic materials and devices, including flat panel displays and bio-sensors. Current research areas in his lab are multivalent batteries, fuel cells, and growth and characterization of new topological insulators and semi-metals.
Dr. Rolf Könenkamp
Dr. Könenkamp earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Tulane University. He has worked as a scientist in the US, Germany, and Japan and taught at Freie Universität Berlin and Princeton University before coming to Portland State in 2002. Topics covered in the Könenkamp lab include electron optics and aberration correction for high-resolution photoelectron microscopes, fabrication of nano-structured devices, growth of highly structured semiconductors, and several characterization techniques.
Dr. Jay Nadeau
Dr. Nadeau got her PhD in theoretical nuclear physics from the University of Minnesota in 1996. She then was Burroughs-Wellcome postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Henry A. Lester at Caltech doing experimental neuroscience, using engineered viral vectors to change the properties of neurons. After 2 years as a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Life Detection, she became an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at McGill University, where she stayed for 11 years, receiving tenure in 2009. At McGill, she traveled several times to the Canadian High Arctic to develop microscopy tools for extreme field work. She joined PSU in the Fall of 2017 and her research group features chemists, microbiologists, computer scientists, physicists, and mathematicians, all learning from each other and hoping to speak each other’s language. A believer in bringing biology to physicists as well as physics to biologists, she has created multiple 400/500 courses and written a textbook, Introduction to Experimental Biophysics. Current research includes developing new microscopy techniques, the use of fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy to characterize bacteria, bacterial encapsulation for pro-biotics, and the spread of bacteria and viruses through water droplets.