ECE ILLINOIS welcomes two new faculty members

The new year brings two new tenure-track faculty members to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois.

Assistant Professor Kejie Fang received his PhD in physics from Stanford University in 2013. He comes to ECE ILLINOIS from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he held appointments as a postdoctoral scholar and senior research scientist. He will conduct research at the Micro and Nanotechnology Lab at Illinois. His research interests center around nanophotonics and quantum photonics, with an emphasis on physics exploration and chip-scale integration.

He studies light manipulation and light-matter interaction at micro- and nano-scales, with a focus on synthesizing emergent optical states and making quantum photonic devices. His goal is to address emerging technology challenges from manipulation of single photons on chips to large-scale integration. He has authored 17 articles and papers, which have appeared in Nature Physics, Nature Photonics, and Physical Review Letters.

Assistant Professor Jian Huang received his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2017. At Illinois, he is also affiliated with the Coordinated Science Lab. His research interests lie in the areas of computer systems, including operating systems, systems architecture, systems security, distributed systems, and especially the intersections of those areas.

He enjoys building computer systems. The goal of his research is to build practical, reliable, secure, and high-performance systems, and to bridge all layers of systems stack from hardware platforms to applications. His research contributions have been published at top-tier systems, architecture, and security conferences. His work won the Best Paper Award at USENIX ATC in 2015 and the IEEE Micro Top Picks Honorable Mention in 2016. Most of the technologies he has developed have had an impact on industrial and real-world systems, and some are being transferred into products including those at Microsoft data centers. His collaborative research with MSR won the Microsoft Research Outstanding Project Award in 2017.