ECE Florida is proud to welcome two new members to our faculty—both of whom have been recognized as ‘Rising Stars’ by the MIT-launched Rising Star program. Rising Stars is an intensive workshop for women graduate students and postdocs who are interested in pursuing academic careers in electrical engineering and computer science.
Dr. Shreya Saxena and Dr. Najme Embrahimi officially started with ECE Florida on Jan. 1.
Shreya Saxena
Dr. Shreya Saxena is broadly interested in the neural control of coordinated, complex movements. She completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying the closed-loop control of fast movements from a control theory perspective. Dr. Saxena received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), and an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. She was a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute focusing on data-driven modeling of high-dimensional neural activity and the ensuing behavior.
Her current research focuses on analyzing how global cortical activity leads to a variety of task-related as well as spontaneous movements, and exploring how population activity in the motor cortex flexibly controls movements at a continuum of speeds. Dr. Saxena was honored to have been selected as an MIT Rising Star in both Electrical Engineering (2019) and Biomedical Engineering (2018).
Dr. Najme Ebrahimi
Prior to joining UF, Dr. Najme Ebrahimi was a a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan, where she mainly conducted research on both mm-Wave/THz high data rate communication and sensing in addition to the connectivity of the next generation of distributed Internet-of-Things network. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in June 2017, with thesis emphasis on enabling high data rate and scalable mm-wave phased array for the next generation of smart wireless world. She received her M.S. degree and B.S. degree, with highest honors, from Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2011 and Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran, in 2009, respectively.
She was selected as 2019 EECS Rising Star by the MIT-launched Rising Star program and was also selected as a 2020 ISSCC Rising Star by the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society.