June 2, 2025
Join us in welcoming Stefania Fresca, Yaodong Li, Sirine Maalej and Ashish Manohar as new faculty to the ME department this fall.
Stefania Fresca
Stefania Fresca will join ME in September as an assistant professor in physics-based machine learning. Her research interests include scientific machine learning, reduced order modeling, deep learning, digital twins and numerical approximation of partial differential equations. Previously, Fresca was a visiting faculty member at the University of Cambridge. Before that, Fresca was an assistant professor in numerical analysis and a postdoctoral research fellow at MOX (Laboratory for Modeling and Scientific Computing) in the mathematics department at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. She earned her Ph.D. cum laude in 2021 from Politecnico di Milano, where she focused on cardiac modeling.
Yaodong Li
Yaodong Li will join ME as an assistant professor in quantum information science and technology. His research combines theoretical and numerical tools, as well as collaborations with experimental groups. Previously, he was a Bloch Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, where he studied various aspects of condensed matter physics and quantum error correction. He was also an intern at IBM Research. Li earned his Ph.D. in physics from UC Santa Barbara, where his work focused on quantum many-body dynamics, including the measurement-induced phase transitions.
Sirine Maalej
Sirine Maalej is a new assistant teaching professor in the ME department with a background in micromechanics, computational mechanics and extensive professional experience in mechanical design. Previously, Maalej was faculty and program head at the British Columbia Institute of Technology in Canada, where she helped advance the mechanical engineering bachelor’s program and cross-disciplinary research initiatives. Maalej holds a master’s in computational mechanics from École Polytechnique de Tunisie, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Centrale Lille in France. She is also a licensed Professional Engineer in Canada.
Ashish Manohar
Ashish Manohar is joining ME as an assistant professor in medical imaging physics. His research focuses on developing robust imaging algorithms that leverage the high spatial resolution and three-dimensional capabilities of computed tomography (CT) imaging for the accurate, precise quantification of cardiac structure and function. Previously, Manohar was a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Stanford University. He earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from UC San Diego, and received both predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships from the American Heart Association.