Academics and entrepreneurs from around the world have joined the faculty at the UCF College of Engineering and Computer Science for the Fall 2026 semester.
A total of 17 new faculty from Mexico, Colombia, Germany and the U.S. bring a wide range of expertise to six of the college’s seven academic units. This group, which includes industry scientists, research faculty and UCF alumni, specialize in topics such as nuclear engineering, robotic systems, coastal hazards, efficient computation, biomechanics and system optimization.
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Kunal Mondal
Associate Professor
Mondal joins UCF from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he served as a nuclear fuel cycle engineer. Prior to that, he worked at the Idaho National Laboratory and completed postdoctoral work at Florida Atlantic University and North Carolina State University. Mondal’s research focuses on the development of sustainable energy systems for next-generation technologies. He is a licensed professional engineer in Idaho.
Juan Rodriguez
Associate Lecturer
Rodriguez brings years of experience in academia, having been an instructor at CETYS University in Mexico, a lecturer at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and an aeronautical engineering instructor at the National Test Pilot School in California. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Seongmi Song
Assistant Professor
Song joins UCF from the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, where she served as a postdoctoral scholar. Her background is in research engineering and biomechanics, with previous academic positions at Texas A&M University, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, and the Seoul Asan Medical Center. Her work focuses on neurobiomechanics, specifically investigating the intersection of neural biomarkers, human movement and assistive robotic technologies such as exoskeletons. Her goal is to develop intelligent assistive devices and objective biomarkers that improve mobility and quality of life for individuals with movement disorders. At UCF, she joins the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering as an assistant professor and is a member of the Disability, Aging and Technology (DAT) faculty research cluster.
Wenzhong Zhou
Associate Professor
Zhou brings an expertise in nuclear engineering and energy to UCF along with years of industry experience. Prior to joining UCF, he served as a principal engineer at Westinghouse Electric Company and as a faculty member at several universities around the world. His work focuses on the development of multiscale and mutiphysics modeling and simulation methods for nuclear fuels and materials, reactor safety and thermal hydraulics. His research supports both existing light water reactors and advanced nuclear energy systems. He has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and more than 50 conference papers, and his work has been highly cited by nuclear engineering researchers. He joins UCF as an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and as a member of the Resilient, Intelligent and Sustainable Energy Systems (RISES) faculty research cluster.
Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering
Yohanna Mejia Cruz
Assistant Professor
Through her research, Cruz aims to transform buildings and infrastructure into intelligent systems capable of sensing, interpreting and responding to human needs. Through the integration of probabilistic modeling, signal processing, machine learning and multi-modal sensing technologies, she develops infrastructure embedded systems that enable the continuous assessment of human mobility, behavior and functional change in everyday environments. Prior to joining UCF, she served as an assistant professor at Montana Technological University. She earned her doctoral degree in civil engineering from the University of South Carolina and master’s degrees and bachelor’s degrees in civil engineering from the Universidad del Valle in Colombia.
Shahrior Pervaz
Research Assistant Professor
Pervaz joins UCF from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology’s Accident Research Institute. Prio to that, he served as a postdoctoral scholar at UCF. His research focuses on the formulation and development of statistical and econometric models and their application to different transportation engineering sectors. The goal is to understand the underlying behavioral patterns and decision processes in transportation planning and safety, and drive behavior. Pervaz is currently involved in multiple research projects funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration, and the National Cooperative Highway Research Program.
Alexandra Schueller
Assistant Professor
Prior to joining UCF, Schueller served as an endowed professor at the Koblenz University of Applied Sciences in Germany as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Applied Coastal Research at the University of Delaware. She also has an appointment as guest investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Before entering academia full time, she spent more than a decade in public water administration and disaster management in Germany. Her research focuses on coastal and riverine hazards, nearshore hydrodynamics, coastal geotechnics, reconnaissance science and flood emergency management.
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Xin Chen
Assistant Professor
Chen is the co-founder of and senior scientist at Equatic, a company that designs and commissions carbon removal facilities that use electrolyzed seawater to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral scholar and research engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned his doctoral degree in materials engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a master’s degree in materials science from the Illinois Institute of Technology. His research areas focuses on electrochemical materials, methods and systems.
Sunny Gupta
Assistant Professor
Sunny Gupta earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics, with a minor in materials, from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and a doctoral degree in materials science and nanoengineering from Rice University. He conducted postdoctoral research at University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and later served as a Research Scientist at Rice University. His research is centered on employing and developing theoretical and computational approaches for discovering new emergent quantum behavior in 2D materials, revealing their synthesis pathways, and ultimately integrate the novel electronic and spin transport phenomena into next-generation devices.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Mingyo Seo
Assistant Professor
Seo’s research focuses on embodiment-aware skill learning methods that enable knowledge sharing and composition across diverse robotic embodiments. He takes a holistic, full-stack approach, incorporating structural priors from robotic systems into data-driven skill learning. He received his doctoral degree from The University of Texas at Austin, his master’s degree from the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, and his bachelor’s degree from Tohoku University. He has also conducted research at the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, now known as the RAI Institute; Dexterity; and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology.
Chenghao Wan
Assistant Professor
Prior to joining UCF, Wan served as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. His research focuses on applied electromagnetics in photonics, thermal radiation engineering, nanomaterials and more. His goal is to leverage wave-matter interactions to improve the efficiency and scalability of next-generation energy systems. At UCF, Wan in also a member of the Resilient, Intelligent and Sustainable Energy Systems (RISES) Center.
Department of Computer Science
Mohammed Al Kinoon
Lecturer
Al Kinoon is a two-time UCF grad, having earned both his master’s and doctoral degrees from the Department of Computer Science. His research focus is cybersecurity with an emphasis on healthcare security and privacy. Prior to joining UCF, Al Kinoon served as a lecturer at Old Dominion University, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in cybersecurity and computer science. His research interests include network security, machine learning and cyber threat intelligence. As an educator, he is passionate about helping students develop the technical knowledge and practical skills needed for successful careers in computing. His primary goal is to foster student success by creating an engaging learning environment that emphasizes critical thinking, hands-on learning and real-world applications.
Yadi Cao
Assistant Professor
Cao earned his doctoral degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Diego, before joining UCF. As a computer scientist, he develops field-ready machine learning for science and engineering — models and agents that hold up not just on clean benchmarks, but under the constraints that real research and real hardware impose. His work has been adopted by companies like Rolls Royce and General Atomics.
Karthik Gajulapalli
Assistant Professor
Gajulapalli hails from Georgetown University, where he earned his doctoral degree in computer science. His research focuses on understanding the power and limitations of efficient computation. Broadly, he develops algorithmic techniques for proving computational lower bounds while also designing efficient algorithms and data structures.
Jakub Tomczak
Associate Professor
Tomczak’s expertise is in generative AI, and he brings more than 15 years of industry experience in machine learning, deep learning and AI to UCF. He is the author of the first fully comprehensive book on AI, “Deep Generative Modeling.” He is also the founder of the AI companies Amsterdam AI Solutions and GenSiLab Inc.
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
Edgar Gutiérrez-Franco
Associate Lecturer
Franco joins UCF from the Universidad Externado de Colombia, where he led applied research initiatives and graduate programs in digital transformation, business analytics and information technology. He serves as the president of the Latin America and Caribbean chapter of the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS). In 2025, he led the winning team of the INFORMS CODE program, a competitive international award recognizing impactful research on operational challenges in emerging economies. His research focuses on the use of advanced analytics, optimization, simulation and artificial intelligence to improve decision-making in complex operational environments, and he has published more than 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and books.
Junfeng Ma
Associate Professor
Prior to joining UCF, Ma spent 10 years at Mississippi State University, focusing on the design and optimization of complex systems with applications in logistics and transportation, advanced design and manufacturing, and human-robot teaming. To date, he has secured more than $12 million in research funding from federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense and the Department of Transportation. He earned his doctoral degree from Pennsylvania State University in 2016.