University of Washington Electrical & Computer Engineering (UW ECE) is proud to announce that postdoctoral research scholar Shana Moothedath and doctoral student Yuanyuan Shi have each accepted tenure-track assistant professorship positions in the ECE departments of Iowa State University (ISU) and the University of California San Diego (UCSD), respectively.
Shana Moothedath
Shana Moothedath will be joining the faculty of Iowa State University’s ECpE department in January 2021. Currently, she is a postdoctoral research scholar in UW ECE working with ECE professors Radha Poovendran and Linda Bushnell. Her research interests include control and security of cyber-physical systems, control and optimization of networked systems, game theory, learning, and control for secure systems.
“I would like to thank my mentors at UW, Professor Radha Poovendran and Professor Linda Bushnell, for their dedicated guidance and continuous support,” notes Shana. “I would also like to thank all my collaborators and my colleagues at the Network Security Lab for their support, cooperation, and encouragement. I owe my deepest gratitude to my family and all of my friends for their patience and support.”
Shana received her B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Kerala University, India in 2011 and 2014 and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India in 2018. She was awarded the Excellence in Ph.D. Thesis Award 2017-2019 at IIT Bombay and selected as an EECS Rising Star in 2019.
“I was fortunate to be able to attend mentorship workshops, iREDEFINE, and Rising Stars,” Shana adds, “which helped me incredibly in navigating through the process of my academic job search. I thank my mentors for supporting me to attend these very informative conferences.”
“I am very honored and excited to start my career at Iowa State University and I am looking forward to the research opportunities and collaborations at ISU.” – Shana Moothedath
Yuanyuan Shi
Yuanyuan Shi plans to join the ECE department’s faculty at UC San Diego in July 2021, following a one-year postdoc at Caltech working with professors Anima Anandkumar and Adam Wierman.
Yuanyuan is currently a fifth-year Ph.D. student in UW ECE, advised by ECE professor Baosen Zhang. Her research focuses on power and energy systems using machine learning, optimization and control.
“I feel really lucky to have joined UW ECE and Prof. Baosen Zhang’s lab in 2015,” says Yuanyuan. “During the past five years, I have had supportive mentors who gave me generous suggestions, endless encouragement and helpful guidance in both my research and career.”
She continues, “I am also associated with the Renewable Energy Analysis Lab (REAL), where I met good friends and benefited a lot from the enlightening discussions. Last but not least, I am grateful for the department’s support for us to attend career-development workshops such as the NSF iREDEFINE workshop and Grace Hopper Conference, where I benefited a lot from academic job searching preparations.”
In the course of earning her Ph.D., Yuanyuan has interned at DeepMind, JD.com and Doosan GridTech. She was also a UW Clean Energy Institute Graduate Fellow, named a Rising Star in EECS by MIT in 2018, and awarded the Irene Peden Fellowship in 2019. Before coming to the UW, Yuanyuan received her bachelor’s degree in Automation Engineering from Nanjing University (China) in 2015.
“The ECE department at UCSD has long been a dream place for me to work. I love the department culture there, as well as its people and location,” says Yuanyuan.
Yuanyuan’s long-term research vision is to develop algorithms and mechanisms to make the energy system more efficient, intelligent and sustainable. Her Ph.D. research has yielded some very promising steps towards this goal, and she is very excited about the journey ahead at UCSD.
Congratulations, Shana and Yuanyuan, we look forward to the exciting research you will continue to pursue at these institutions!
story by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE News