New faculty to join McKelvey Engineering for 2025-26 academic year

Biomedical Engineering

Piyoosh Sharma, research assistant professor
PhD, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-BHU), India, 2019
MPharm, Savitribai Phule Pune University (formerly known as University of Pune) India, 2009
BPharm, RGPV Bhopal India, 2006

Piyoosh Sharma joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering June 1, 2025, after completing a postdoctoral fellowship from Stephen Fried’s lab in the Department of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University (2020-2025). His broad areas of research include proteomics, chemical, molecular and structural Biology, medicinal chemistry and drug design. Working in the lab of Jai Rudra, associate professor of biomedical engineering, Sharma’s research focus will be on engineering peptide nanofiber-based, adjuvant- and inflammation-free vaccine systems for neurodegeneration. He is also interested in applying mass spectrometry-based proteomics to investigate changes in immune cell proteomes in response to antigen delivery. 

Electrical & Systems Engineering

Mark Anastasio, professor
PhD, medical physics, The University of Chicago, 2001
MS, University of Illinois, 1995
MSE, University of Pennsylvania, 1993
BS, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1992 

Mark A. Anastasio, formerly a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in McKelvey Engineering, returns to WashU Feb. 1, 2026, as the Mallinckrodt Endowed Professor in Imaging Science in the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology (MIR) at WashU Medicine, and a professor of electrical & systems engineering in McKelvey Engineering. He will serve as the vice chair of Imaging Science & AI Research in MIR, co-director of the Oncologic Imaging Program in the Siteman Cancer Center, and associate chief research information officer (biomedical imaging) in the Institute for Informatics, Data Science & Biostatistics. Anastasio will lead the development of a new university-wide center on computational and AI-enabled imaging science, which will involve faculty recruiting in McKelvey Engineering, MIR and various departments across WashU Medicine. On the educational front, he will serve as co-director of the PhD program in Imaging Science. While previously at WashU, he led the development of this interdisciplinary program and served as its founding director.

Anastasio has been the Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering and head of the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since 2019. Under his leadership, the department experienced significant growth in impact and visibility, emerging as a top-tier program. Its educational and research initiatives approximately doubled in size, and the department achieved financial stability. Anastasio’s impact on engineering education was substantial and included initiating and leading the development of the nation’s first bachelor’s degree in neural engineering, a novel hybrid bachelor’s degree that combines bioengineering and computer science, and a new industry-focused bachelor’s degree in biomedical image computing that combines fundamental imaging science concepts with machine learning. Anastasio was also a founding member of the NIH-funded P41 Center for Label-free Imaging and Multiscale Biophotonics and leads the computational imaging and machine learning research in that center. 

Anastasio’s research broadly addresses computational image science, tomographic image reconstruction and inverse problems related to image formation, and machine learning methods for applications in biomedical imaging. He is an internationally recognized authority on photoacoustic computed tomography, which is a rapidly developing imaging modality that combines the benefits of optical and ultrasound imaging. He has made seminal contributions to other wave-based imaging modalities that include X-ray phase-contrast imaging and ultrasound computed tomography. He is an expert on the computational and theoretical aspects of imaging science, which includes the objective, diagnostic-task-based, assessment of image quality and optimization of imaging system performance by use of modern machine learning methods. On these and other topics, he has published over 213 journal articles and 200 conference proceedings and has been awarded approximately $35 million in federal research funding. Anastasio is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE). Recently, he received the 2025 IEEE EMBS William J. Morlock Award for his contributions to image reconstruction and biomedical imaging technology development. Anastasio’s mentoring experience includes 27 previous or current PhD students, 12 postdoctoral researchers and three research faculty members. 

Yingying Fan, assistant professor
PhD, electrical and computer engineering, Rice University, 2025
MS, electrical and computer engineering, University of Michigan, 2019
BE, information engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China, 2017

Yingying Fan, who recently earned a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University, will join the faculty Aug. 1, 2025. She specializes in analog/RF integrated circuits and focuses on application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design for biosensors, bio-actuators, and biology-electronics hybrid systems for neural interfaces and health care applications. While at Rice, Fan was a 2024 Rising Star in EECS (electrical engineering and computer science) at MIT's EECS and a Rising Star in 2024 Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS). She received the SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award, MTT-S Graduate Fellowship and CASS Pre-Doctoral Grant, as well as a Future Faculty Fellowship and the Nettie S. Autrey Fellowship, both from Rice.

Zhiyang Wang, assistant professor
PhD, electrical and systems engineering, University of Pennsylvania, 2025
BS, MS, electrical engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, 2016 and 2019, respectively

Wang will join the department Aug. 1, 2026, after completing postdoctoral research in the Halιcιoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego. 

Wang specializes in signal processing and machine learning with focuses on graph signal processing, graph neural networks, geometric deep learning and complex network systems. She has been recognized as a 2024 Rising Star in Data Science, a 2023 Rising Star in Signal Processing and a 2023 EECS Rising Star. She received the best student paper award at the 29th European Association for Signal Processing Conference and was awarded the Bruce Ford Memorial Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.

Computer Science & Engineering

Kate Holdener, senior lecturer
PhD, computer science, Missouri University of Science and Technology, 2008
MS, computer science, University of Missouri-Rolla, 2005
BS, computer science, BA, mathematics, Truman State University, 2003

Kate Holdener joins McKelvey Engineering Aug. 11, 2025, as a senior lecturer. She has been an associate professor at Saint Louis University in the Department of Computer Science since 2018. Previously, Holdener worked at Exegy Inc. for 10 years in various roles such as software engineer, senior API engineer and product manager. Her research interests focus on the automation of software engineering processes and application of open-source software in computer science education.

Sara Nurollahian, lecturer
PhD, human centered computing, University of Utah, 2025
MS and BS, industrial engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, 2018 and 2016, respectively

Sara Nurollahian joins McKelvey Engineering as a lecturer from the University of Utah, where she recently earned a doctorate in human-centered computing working in the lab of Eliane Wiese on research funded by the National Science Foundation. She has been involved in teaching several courses at the University of Utah and Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, served as a mentor to both graduate and undergraduate students. Nurollahian received the SIGCSE Outstanding Reviewer Award in 2024; the ICSE-SEET Best Paper Award in 2023.

Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science

James Friend, professor and chair
PhD and MS, mechanical engineering, University of Missouri, Rolla, now the Missouri University of Science & Technology, 1998 and 1994, respectively
BS, aerospace engineering, University of Missouri, Rolla, 1992

James Friend will join McKelvey Engineering as chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science this fall. Most recently, he was the Stanford S. and Beverly P. Penner Endowed Chair in Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

His research explores and exploits acoustic phenomena at small scales for primarily biomedical applications. He has more than 270 peer-reviewed research publications, 34 issued patents, 25 provisional patents, and has been awarded more than $31 million in competitive grant-based research funding from such agencies as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the Office of Naval Research.

Two of his patents are responsible for Sonocharge Energy, a startup company founded and run by one of Friend’s former doctoral students. Friend is a senior adviser to the company, which closed Series A funding in May 2024. Friend co-founded Latchability Inc. in 2024 based on a patent-pending integrated microtechnology and machine learning algorithm to quickly identify infant breastfeeding issues to improve breastfeeding rates as well as maternal and infant health. He has founded or co-founded several other companies since 2019 to license and use his acoustofluidic and endovascular fluidic actuator inventions.  

Friend’s research explores and exploits acoustic phenomena at small scales for primarily biomedical applications. He has more than 270 peer-reviewed research publications, 34 issued patents, 25 provisional patents, and has been awarded more than $31 million in competitive grant-based research funding from such agencies as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the Office of Naval Research.

While at UC San Diego, he served as vice chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, serves on a campus-wide committee for promotion and advancement and rejuvenated the Center for Medical Devices and Biomechanics from a virtual center into a laboratory and fabrication-facility-based center in support of five junior School of Medicine clinical faculty and about a dozen Jacobs School of Engineering Faculty. He raised roughly $500,000 in six months of service for the Center on a path to raise $5 million.

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• Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science
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