David Cheng Spiridon Courellis

David Cheng, associate professor of electrical engineering, and Spiridon Courellis, assistant professor of computer science, recently returned from the Dane and Louise Miller Symposium and Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education (CASEE) annual meeting in Indianapolis, Ind.

Raman Unnikrishnan, dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science, nominated Cheng and Courellis for the invitation-only symposium and called their participation a ìgreat honor for the faculty members involved.î

The conference, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering, brought together faculty from universities that have been designated ìHispanic Serving Institutionsî and ìHistorically Black Colleges and Universitiesî to discuss engineering education research.

Cheng has taught on campus since 1985 and served as president of the Asian Faculty and Staff Association since 1994. He is a recipient of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.'s Millennium Medal and chairs the group's Orange County Section. His teaching and research interests include semiconductor devices, optic-electronics, electro-optics and lightwave technology, fiber-optic communications, modeling, simulation and system analysis.

Courellis joined the university in 2004 and quickly plunged into a four-week mentoring program with visiting Japanese professors here on campus. Courellis' research interests center on distributed computation, which involves small, intelligent computing devices that communicate with each other.