About Us

Edward Brown

Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Edward Brown is an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. His research explores the roles of the extracellular matrix in tumor metastasis and the development of novel optical techniques to study those processes. He earned his PhD in physics from Cornell University and was a postdoctoral fellow in the department of Radiation Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences, a DoD BCRP “Era of Hope” Scholar, and currently holds an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.

Mark Buckley

Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Mark Buckley graduated from Haverford College in 2001 with a BS in physics and spent the following year teaching at the Huangshi No. 2 Middle School in Hubei Province, China. Upon his return to the United States, he embarked on a one-year fellowship at the National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics studying radiation dosimetry. Buckley received his PhD in physics from Cornell University in 2010 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the McKay Orthopaedic Research Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania from 2010 to 2012. He joined the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Rochester in January 2013.

Buckley is a recipient of Haverford College’s Louis Green Prize in Physics (2001) and is a former NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) scholar (2008–2009). He has coauthored 20 publications on diverse topics ranging from three-dimensional tracking of swimming bacteria to the mechanical properties of cartilage under shear loading. Buckley is currently interested in “viscoelastic” soft biological tissues like cartilage and tendon that exhibit both fluid- and solid-like mechanical properties. His research emphasizes finding ways to control and exploit these complex properties to diagnose damage and disease, guide rehabilitation protocols, and evaluate treatment and repair strategies in these tissues.

Zhiyao Duan

Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Zhiyao Duan received his BS in automation and MS in control science and engineering from Tsinghua University, China, in 2004 and 2008, respectively, and received his PhD in computer science from Northwestern University in 2013. He joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as assistant professor in 2013. Zhiyao’s research interest is in the broad area of computer audition, i.e., designing computational systems that are capable of analyzing and processing sounds, including music, speech, and environmental sounds. This is an emerging and interdisciplinary area that involves signal processing, machine learning, acoustics, and music theory. Specific problems that he has been working on include automatic music transcription, multi-pitch analysis, music audio-score alignment, sound source separation, and speech enhancement.

Ehsan Hoque

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Ehsan Hoque just finished his PhD at the Media Lab of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As part of his PhD thesis, Ehsan developed a system that allows people to practice social interactions using a laptop. The interaction has been designed so that participants can control the pace of the interaction, be in the driving seat of the session, and practice as many times as they wish. This is particularly useful for people diagnosed with social difficulties and desire help to improve their interaction skills (e.g., poor eye contact and inflection of voice) but fear social stigma. For more details, see https://www.media.mit.edu/video/view/mehoque-2013-07-15. Ehsan’s work on nonverbal behavior understanding and recognition has been published in IEEE/ACM journals, received best paper nominations at the top artificial intelligence (AI) conferences, and appeared in popular press, including Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, and PBS, among many. Some of his research prototypes (e.g., Disney animatronics, MIT Mood Meter) have been deployed in Disney Parks and at several public places of MIT, allowing open interaction with thousands of people and data collection for an extended period. Ehsan intends to continue his research of inventing the future of emotion technology and enabling new interaction possibilities in the areas of health and assistive technologies. He’s excited about doing research that makes a real-world impact and improves quality of life.

Doug Kelley

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Professor Doug Kelley joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering as a tenure-track assistant professor on July 1, 2013. Kelley, who has a BS in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, received his PhD in physics from the University of Maryland, where he worked on rotating hydromagnetic experiments to model planetary cores. He brings a breadth of postdoctoral experience. He comes to Rochester from MIT, where he did a year of postdoctoral work under Donald R. Sadoway, focusing on the measurement, simulation, and control of mixing in liquid metal batteries. He spent three years before that as a postdoctoral associate with Nicholas T. Ouellette at Yale University, where he studied the relation of Lagrangian Coherent Structures to spectral energy transport, identifying the separate stretching and folding processes of fluid mixing. Professor Kelley’s research is in the experimental and computational dynamics of fluid flows as non-equilibrium, dynamical systems. This approach can be applied to energy technologies like liquid metal batteries or natural phenomena like the ecological dynamics of oceanic phytoplankton, affecting Earth’s climate. Professor Kelley has a strong publication record, having published in journals including Nature Physics, Physics of Fluids, Chaos, and Physical Review Letters. He brings extensive teaching experience as a graduate student and postdoc and has involved many undergraduate students in several research projects under his supervision.

Wyatt Tenhaeff

Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering

Wyatt Tenhaeff received a BS in chemical engineering from Oregon State University in 2004 and a PhD in chemical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009. His PhD thesis research emphasized the development of polymer thin film coatings by chemical vapor deposition techniques. After receiving his PhD, Wyatt won the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Weinberg Fellowship in 2009. At ORNL, he worked on the development of electrolytes for solid state lithium batteries as well as several other materials problems in lithium ion batteries. He was a staff scientist at ORNL for three and a half years before coming to Rochester. Wyatt joined the Department of Chemical Engineering in July 2013. His current research focus is the development of novel solid electrolytes for a wide range of electrochemical energy storage systems. Solid state batteries and hybrid flow batteries for grid-level energy storage are examples of the practical applications of these materials. His work will also focus on the development of engineered surfaces/interfaces to simultaneously prolong the service life and increase the accessible energy density of existing lithium ion battery electrode materials.