Faculty Appointed to Named Professorships

Six Columbia Engineering faculty members have been appointed to named professorships, effective July 1. These endowed professorships support faculty research and honor a faculty member’s significant and wide-reaching achievement in a given field, while honoring the support of our donors. 

The six faculty members are:

• Liliana Borcea, George P. Livanos Professor of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics
• Ke Cheng, Alan L. Kaganov Professor of Biomedical Engineering
• Ronghui Gu, Tang Family Associate Professor of Computer Science
• Carl Vondrick, YM Associate Professor of Computer Science
• Ngai Yin Yip, La Von Duddleson Krumb Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Engineering
• Henry Yuen, Srivani Family Associate Professor of Computer Science

Liliana Borcea, George P. Livanos Professor of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics

The George P. Livanos Professor of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics was created through a generous gift directed by Peter Livanos through the George P. Livanos Foundation. Peter earned a BS in industrial engineering and operations research from Columbia Engineering in 1981 and has been an active alumnus.

Liliana Borcea joined Columbia July 1 after working, most recently, as the Peter Field Collegiate Professor of Mathematics at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she had taught since 2013. Prior to this, she worked at Rice University and the California Institute of Technology, with visiting professorships across the globe at Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo in Firenze, Italy; Stanford University; and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France. 

Borcea’s research is in applied mathematics. She is particularly interested in wave propagation in random media with applications to inverse wave scattering and free space optical communications; inverse problems for hyperbolic, elliptic, and parabolic partial differential equations; and data-driven reduced order modeling and applications to inverse problems. Professor Borcea has received many honors, including multiple NSF fellowships early in her career, the SIAM SIGEST award (2012), the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky prize (2017), and the Rothschild Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences of Cambridge University (2023). Professor Borcea was recognized for her excellence with an election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023). In addition to her numerous awards and fellowships, she has been invited to give plenary talks and colloquia across the world. For example, she was the Plenary Speaker at the SIAM Imaging Science Conference in 2022, and gave a Distinguished Women in Mathematics lecture at the University of Texas, Austin in 2018. She earned her BS (1987) in applied physics from the University of Bucharest in Romania and her PhD (1996) in scientific computing and computational mathematics at Stanford University. 

Borcea’s career is demonstrative of the intellectual rigor and transformational research that continues to define Columbia Engineering.

Ke Cheng, Alan L. Kaganov Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Created through a generous gift by Carol M. Kaganov (Kaufman) to honor her late husband, Alan, the Alan L. Kaganov Professorship supports outstanding scholars who work in the field of biomedical engineering, with a special focus on pulmonary and/or cardiovascular systems. A leader in biomedical engineering and a graduate of Columbia Engineering, Alan Kaganov held 15 U.S. patents and helped develop treatments for several conditions, including heart arrhythmia, internal issues, spinal and circulatory disease, and drug-delivery systems.

Ke Cheng joined Columbia in July 2023 from North Carolina State University, where he was Randall B. Terry, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Regenerative Medicine, the director of the Biotherapeutics Laboratory, and the co-director of the NIH Comparative Molecular Medicine T32 Training Program. Cheng’s area of expertise in pulmonary bioengineering is of increasing relevance since the COVID pandemic and has strengthened the school’s capability in this area. His research is critical to global health needs and captures the ethos of engineering for a healthy humanity. Research from the Cheng lab has been summarized in publications in Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Science Translational Medicine, Circulation Research, European Heart Journal, and more. Cheng is a fellow of the International Association of Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE), the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the American Heart Association (AHA). Additionally, he serves as the editor-in-chief for Extracellular Vesicle (Elsevier) and associate editor for Bioactive Materials; most recently, he finished serving his term as chair of the NIH Biomaterials and Biointerfaces (BMBI) Study Section. Cheng earned his BS in pharmaceutical engineering at Zhejiang University (2004) and his PhD in biological engineering from the University of Georgia (2008).

Ronghui Gu, Tang Family Associate Professor of Computer Science

The Tang Family Professorship was established through a generous pledge from the Goldenway Education Foundation Limited, which is directed by Columbia Engineering parents Hao Tang and Hong Zhu.

Ronghui Gu joined Columbia as an assistant professor in 2018 after earning his BS (2011) from Tsinghua University and his PhD (2016) at Yale, all in computer science. He was promoted to associate professor on Jan. 1. His thesis work on building certified OS kernels received the Yale Doctoral Dissertation Award. He is the primary designer and developer of CertiKOS, the first verified concurrent OS kernel, and SeKVM, the first verified commodity cloud hypervisor. Gu co-founded CertiK, a Web3 cybersecurity unicorn startup. For his work in systems verification, Gu received an NSF CAREER Award, a VMware Systems Research Award, three Amazon Research Awards, an OSDI Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award, an SOSP Best Paper Award, a CACM Research Highlight, and the inaugural Tang Family Assistant Professorship, which he held until his recent promotion to associate professor. Gu’s research advances safety-critical software to make them truly trustworthy through formal verification.

Carl Vondrick, YM Associate Professor of Computer Science

The YM Professorship is a career development professorship created in 2023 through a generous anonymous pledge from current parents.

Carl Vondrick joined Columbia as an assistant professor of computer science in 2018 and was promoted to associate professor (without tenure, but on tenure track) in January of 2023. He was named the inaugural YM Associate Professor of Computer Science in September 2023. Vondrick was tenured effective July 1, and will continue to carry the YM Associate Professor of Computer Science title into this next phase of his career. 

Vondrick holds an MS (2013) and PhD (2017) in computer science from MIT. He specializes in the development of self-supervised methods for visual learning, with the goal of creating computer algorithms that learn to see, understand, and recreate the visual world without a human teacher. By training machines to observe and interact with their surroundings, he aims to create robust and versatile models for perception. The impact of this work is broad-ranging, with immediate applications in visual monitoring and security, virtual reality, augmented reality, visual effects, and photography, and potential impacts in many other fields including robotics, health, and climate. A highly referenced author, he has published 45 conference papers in the most prestigious venues of the field as well as 6 journal papers. 

Vondrick has been recognized through several large awards, among them the IEEE PAMI Young Researcher Award (2024), the National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) Award (2021), the Toyota Research Institute Young Faculty Award (2021), and an Amazon Research Award (2018). His vibrant and prolific research team works on exciting problems at the intersection of machine learning, computer vision, audio processing, robotics, and computer graphics.

Ngai Yin Yip, La Von Duddleson Krumb Associate Professor

Established in 2019, the La Von Duddleson Krumb Professorship of Earth and Environmental Engineering supports early career faculty as they work to advance their research with the aim of achieving the rank of full professor. Ngai Yin Yip previously served as the inaugural La Von Duddleson Krumb Assistant Professor. 

Yip joined Columbia in 2015 on the tenure track after working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, of which Yip is an alumnus. He earned his BEng (2004) with a minor in business administration at NTU and his PhD (2014) in chemical and environmental engineering from Yale. He was recently promoted to tenure, effective July 1.

Yip’s research interest is focused on advancing physicochemical technologies and innovations for critical separation challenges in water, energy, and the environment, including high-salinity desalination, zero-liquid discharge, resource recovery from wastewaters, next-generation selective membranes, switchable solvents for water treatment, and mining of critical minerals from unconventional sources. His research contributions have earned him numerous recognitions, including the James J. Morgan Early Career Award (Honorable Mention) from Environmental Science & Technology. He has also been featured as an Emerging Investigator in Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology and as a Young Talent in Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering. He currently serves as an associate editor of RSC journal Environmental Science: Advances. Additionally, he is an Editorial Advisory Board member of ACS ES&T Engineering (ACS) and an editorial board member of Desalination (Elsevier) and Chemical Engineering Journal Advances (Elsevier). His dedication to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion has garnered him the Janette and Armen Avanessians Diversity Award and the Junior Faculty Diversity Advancement Award.

Yip’s research contributions on clean water and energy at Columbia Engineering will continue to advance innovations for the sustainable production of water and energy.

Henry Yuen, Srivani Family Associate Professor of Computer Science

The Srivani Family Professorship was established in 2021 through a generous donation by Columbia Engineering Board of Visitors member and parent Krishna Swaroop (Kittu) Kolluri.

Henry Yuen joined Columbia as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2021 after working as an assistant professor at University of Toronto and a postdoctoral associate at UC Berkeley. He earned his BA (2010) in mathematics from the University of Southern California and his PhD (2016) in computer science at MIT. He is a theoretical computer scientist whose goal is to understand the fundamental principles of computation and communication in a universe governed by quantum physics. In his research, Yuen utilizes ideas and tools from a variety of disciplines, ranging from complexity theory to quantum physics to information theory. He has made a number of contributions to the theory of quantum multiprover interactive proofs, including the discovery that such interactive proofs can verify solutions to uncomputable problems. Yuen also works on quantum cryptography; some of his contributions include designing protocols for infinite randomness expansion using untrusted quantum hardware. For his contributions, he has been named a Sloan Research Fellow and was also a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, both in 2022. He was promoted to associate professor on Jan. 1, 2024. 

Yuen’s research agenda in quantum computing and cryptography are crucial to important strategic initiatives at Columbia Engineering.