Six new faculty members are joining the Department of Materials Science and Nanoengineering (MSNE) at Rice, including a National Academy of Engineering member who will become the new department chair.
On Jan. 1, Karen Lozano will become the William Marsh Rice Trustee Chair, professor and chair of MSNE. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. from Rice in the department then called mechanical engineering and materials science in 1996 and 1999, respectively.
In 2000, she joined the faculty at the University of Texas-Pan American, now the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), where she is presently the Julia Beecherl Endowed Professor of Mechanical Engineering and founding director of the Nanotechnology Center at UTRGV. In 2023 she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
She will succeed Pulickel Ajayan, Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor, who has served as the founding chair of MSNE since 2014.
The other new MSNE faculty members are:
Xuedan Ma, associate professor: She earned her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Hamburg, Germany, in 2011. Before joining Rice on July 1, she was an RD3 scientist at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne National Laboratory. Her research interests include quantum optics, nanophotonics, high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy, and low-dimensional semiconductor and spintronic materials.
Guilherme Migliato Marega, assistant professor: He earned his Ph.D. in microsystems and microelectronics from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland in 2023. He is currently an experimental postdoctoral fellow in the Kavli Institute for Nanoscale Science at Cornell University. His research focuses on using emerging nanomaterials to create new devices and systems for advanced computing technologies. He will join the Rice faculty on Jan. 1, 2026.
Harris Pirie, assistant professor: He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 2021 and has since served as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Oxford, U.K. His research focuses on quantum materials with strong electron interactions, which often produce unexpected, emergent phases, like high-temperature superconductivity or fractional quantum Hall states. He will join the Rice faculty on Jan. 1, 2026.
Christina Tringides, assistant professor: She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University/MIT in biophysics and health science technology in 2022. Since then she has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Eidgenössische Technische Hochshule Zürich, Switzerland. She is a core member of the Neuroengineering Initiative at Rice, which she joined on July 1. Her research focuses on developing new materials and neurotechnologies to interface with the nervous system, from the cell to organ levels, and for both in vivo and in vitro applications.
Xiang Zhang, assistant research professor: He earned his Ph.D. from Rice in applied physics/MSNE and served as a postdoctoral researcher and research scientist in the lab of Pulickel Ajayan at Rice. His research interests include two-dimensional nanomaterials, diamond synthesis, and decarbonization using plasma techniques.