New Faculty
Lingyang Chu, Assistant Professor, Computing and Software
Lingyang Chu received a doctoral degree from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China in 2015. He was most recently a principal researcher at Huawei Technologies Canada, where he leads a research team focused on deep neural network interpretation, AI fairness, federated learning and big data analytics. Before joining Huawei, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University. His research works in large scale graph mining and interpretable AI have been published in top-tier venues. One of his works on interpretable AI was reported by a mainstream web portal of AI research in China in 2018.
Maureen Lagos, Associate Professor, Materials Science and Engineering
Maureen Joel Lagos is also an Affiliated Faculty of the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy (CCEM). By harnessing the power of electron spectroscopy and imaging techniques, he investigates the phonon (thermal) and electronic behavior of advanced nanomaterials, with emphasis on nanodevice heat transport and nanophotonics applications. He is the recipient of several international awards and grants, including the Microscopy and Microanalysis postdoctoral scholar award (2018) and the NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement (2019). He has also participated as an invited speaker in several international conferences and served as a referee for international top journals.
Leili Tafaghodi, Associate Professor, Materials Science and Engineering
Leili Tafaghodi started her research career at Sharif University of Technology, and moved to the University of Toronto for her graduate studies, where she completed her PhD research on thermodynamics of silicon refining. Prior to joining McMaster, she was an Assistant Professor and the Extractive Metallurgy chair at the Materials Engineering department at the University of British Columbia.
Thomas Lee, Assistant Professor, W. Booth School of Engineering Practice and Technology
Tom Lee has joined the Faculty of Engineering after a highly successful career in industry. Most recently, he was Chief Education Officer at Quanser, leading the commercialization of advanced academic lab platforms for autonomous system applications and engineering AI. Prior to that, he held senior positions at Maplesoft where he did pioneering work in advanced computation and modeling for engineering physical systems. At Certicom, he worked on the commercialization of cryptographic protocols for mobile devices. Uniquely, his experience straddles both high tech and academia citing many industry-university collaborations with leading institutions throughout his career. In 2019 he was elected Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering for his contribution to engineering entrepreneurship and education. Tom also holds the Walter G. Booth Endowed Chair of Engineering Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
Hamidreza Mahyar, Assistant Professor, W. Booth School of Engineering Practice and Technology
Before joining McMaster University, Hamidreza Mahyar was a postdoctoral research fellow at Boston University and Technical University of Vienna working with Eugene Stanley. Hamidreza received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Sharif University of Technology in February 2018. He has been a visiting research scholar at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and his research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, network science, and natural language processing, with a current emphasis on the fast-growing subject of graph neural networks with applications in social networks, recommendation systems, and drug discovery. In addition to his research and teaching experiences, he has been involved in various industrial projects. He was a deep learning scientist in SemI40 and iDev40, the two biggest projects in Industry 4.0 Europe, at Infineon Technologies. He was also a senior machine learning scientist at ProteinQure, modeling and designing protein drugs with the help of deep neural networks. Moreover, Hamidreza co-founded a Canadian context-aware conversational AI assistant start-up backed by NEXT Canada.
New Industry Professor Appointment
Samir Sahli has been appointed as an Industry Professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering effective January 1, 2021 for a five-year term. Dr. Sahli is a National Digital Data and AI Specialist with Microsoft Canada. He plans to lend his combined experience with industry and applied research in biomedical engineering to his collaborations with members of School through workshops, symposiums and graduate lectures.
Postdoctoral Fellow Appointments
Chemical Engineering
Meng Wu, Supervisor: Charles de Lannoy, effective September 2020
Fei Xu, Supervisor: Todd Hoare, effective September 2020
Syed Ali Abbas Zaidi, Supervisor: Li Xi, effective September 2020
Jinlei Li, Supervisor: Michael Thompson, effective October 2020
Afshin Abrishamkar, Supervisor: Todd Hoare, effective November 2020
Lisha Zhao, Supervisor: Todd Hoare, effective January 2021
Madeline Simpson, Supervisor: Todd Hoare, effective January 2021
Karim Soliman, Supervisor: Heather Sheardown, effective January 2021
Civil Engineering
Maysara Ghaith, Supervisor: Wael El-Dakhakhni, effective September 2020
Bouaima Kouanda, Supervisor: Paulin Coulibaly, effective September 2020
Ahmed Ahmed, Supervisors: Sarah Dickson-Anderson and Wael El-Dakhakhni, effective December 2020
Mohamed Ismail, Supervisor: Wael El-Dakhakhni, effective January 2021
Feras Alsheet, Supervisors: Ghani Razaqpur and Younggy Kim, effective January 2021
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Mahdi Naghshvarianjahromi, Supervisors: Jamal Deen and Shiva Kumar, effective September 2020
Diego Garcia, Supervisor: Ali Emadi, effective January 2021
Zekun Xia, Supervisor: Ali Emadi, effective January 2021
Materials Science and Engineering
Darren Feenstra, Supervisors: Joey Kish and Hatem Zurob, effective January 2021
Gopi Krishnan, Supervisor: Nabil Bassim, effective January 2021
Yi Feng, Supervisor: André Phillion, effective January 2021
Mechanical Engineering
Carlos Vidal, Supervisor: Ali Emadi, effective September 2020
Alireza Shahin-Shamsabadi, Supervisor: Ravi Selvaganapathy, effective September 2020
Mohammad Heidari, Supervisor: James Cotton, effective September 2020
Amid Shakeri, Supervisor: Tohid Didar, effective October 2020
Majid Abdoos, Supervisor: Stephen Veldhuis, effective January 2021
W Booth School of Engineering Practice and Technology
Saeed Mohammadi, Supervisor: Fei Geng, effective September 2020
