Volgenau School of Engineering

Missy Cummings, one of the country’s first female fighter pilots and the director of Mason’s autonomy and robotics center, calls herself a tech futurist, charged with making tech work and helping it get better. She isn’t shy about calling out bad tech either, including the vision systems in self-driving cars and Tesla’s Autopilot.

As a sophomore, electrical engineering major Sai Srivatsav Gutala started a student club called the Inventors and Innovations Team (IIT) with one of his classmates, computer engineering major Nicholas Paschke.

Research Interests: Systems Engineering Theory and Engineering Design Decision Making. 

Missy Cummings will be the new director of the Center for Robotics, Autonomous Systems, and Translational AI

Research Interests: Security assessment of wireless network protocols, threat modeling and counter-mechanism design, cross-technology spectrum sharing, dynamic spectrum access, and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. 

Zelalem Eshete is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Research Interests: Mechanics and material behavior.

Research interests: Machine learning and statistical modeling, explainable AI, model fairness and robustness, data exploration, and active learning.

College of Engineering and Computing (CEC) Professor Janis Terpenny has joined the National Science Foundation Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) where she will serve in the expert role and lead in the creation of CMMI’s Manufacturing System Integration program.

Research Interests: Smart integrated systems and processes for design and manufacturing and on design education.