Systems alum, former postdocs land teaching positions

As the Cornell Systems program continues to grow, it’s making more of an impact outside of Ithaca as a recent Ph.D. graduate and two postdoctoral researchers have landed tenure-track teaching positions at other universities.

Patrick Kastner, who received his Ph.D. in December 2022, has been appointed assistant professor with the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Minghui Cheng and Qianzhi Zhang, who were both Cornell Systems Engineering Ezra research associates, have joined the University of Miami (FL) and The University of Alabama, respectively, as assistant professors.

Patrick Kastner

Starting this fall, Kastner will start his appointment with the School of Architecture at Georgia Tech. He will continue his work on environmental performance simulation that he started in 2018 with Cornell Systems field members Professor Timur Dogan and Oliver Gao, the Howard Simpson Professor in Engineering.

After finishing his Ph.D., Kastner joined Cornell AAP in September 2022 as a postdoctoral associate, providing decision support for the Ithaca's Green New Deal to accelerate efforts to decarbonize Ithaca's building stock until 2030. Early on during his graduate work, Kastner worked with stakeholders from architecture to test his research in practice. Since then, he is the lead developer of Eddy3D, a performance-driven design toolkit that predicts outdoor thermal comfort in cities. Eddy3D is used by leading institutions in academia and practice.

“The field of architecture is a systems discipline,” Kastner said. “I've been very fortunate to have participated in the Systems program at Cornell, which equipped me with a unique perspective and skill set to tackle the grand challenges of tomorrow, especially as they relate to our built environment.”

Kastner holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in systems science and engineering from Cornell, an M.S. in sustainable building science from TU Munich, and a B.S. in energy engineering from FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. During his time in Munich, he also studied technology management at the Center for Digital Technology and Management and led operations at TEDxTUM.

Minghui Cheng

Beginning this fall, Cheng will be jointly appointed by the College of Engineering and School of Architecture at Miami. His focus will be on establishing decision support tools for modeling and management of interdependent infrastructure systems. Specifically, he will be developing efficient algorithms for risk analysis and optimization at a system level and building a user-centric system digital twin to integrate big data.

After receiving his Ph.D., Cheng worked with Gao as a postdoctoral researcher, developing a system digital twin to manage infrastructure systems.

“I really enjoyed the research atmosphere with Cornell Systems,” Cheng said. “It is truly the perfect place for interdisciplinary research. This diverse atmosphere helped me explore a broader range of research topics and create new and innovative research.”

Cheng’s Ph.D. research focused on the sustainability-informed life-cycle management of bridges with an emphasis on surrogate modeling, optimization, and machine learning.

Cheng obtained his Ph.D. in structural engineering from Lehigh University in 2021 under the supervision of Professor Dan Frangopol. Prior to that, he earned his B.E. in civil engineering at Hunan University, China, in 2016.

Qianzhi Zhang

Since June 2022, Zhang worked with Cornell Systems Engineering Professors Gao and Fengqi You as a postdoctoral associate. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Alabama in August.

“While at Cornell, I focused primarily on the fields of transportation electrification and clean energy transition,” said Zhang. “This synergistic association has broadened the scope of my research, extending from the traditional power systems to encompass transportation and energy systems.”

Zhang’s research interests include power/energy management, voltage/var control, system resilience enhancement, transportation electrification, and the applications of advanced optimization and machine learning techniques in power and energy systems.

Zhang received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Iowa State University in May 2022.