Five Women Will Be Joining the Faculty of the School of Engineering at MIT

The Massachusetts Institute of technology has announced the addition of 13 new faculty members in its School of Engineering. Five of the 13 new faculty members are women.

Tai Cohen will be joining the faculty this month as an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. She has been conducting postdoctoral research in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the mechanics of structures subjected to extreme loading conditions. Dr. Cohen holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from Technion University in Israel.

Carmen Guerra-Garcia was appointed an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics. She will be joining the MIT faculty in the fall of 2017. Dr. Guerra-Garcia is conducting research in plasma-assisted combustion, space propulsion, and lightning strikes on aircraft at a Boeing facility in Madrid. She holds a Ph.D. in plasma physics from MIT.

Stefanie Mueller was named an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science. She will be joining the faculty in time for the spring 2017 semester. Her research will include human-computer interaction, computer graphics, computer vision, and robotics. Dr. Mueller received a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

Jennifer Rupp will join the MIT faculty in January as an assistant professor of materials science and engineering. She has been serving as an assistant professor in electrochemical materials at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Earlier, Dr. Rupp conducted research at the National institute of Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan. She holds a Ph.D. from ETH Zürich.

Virginia Vassilevska Williams was appointed associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science. She will join the MIT faculty in January. She has been serving as an assistant professor at Stanford University in California. Her research concerns the design and analysis of algorithms and complexity. Dr. Williams is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology, where she majored in mathematics and engineering and applied science. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.