FACULTY & STAFF

Faculty

Bita Astaneh Asl, Ph.D., Assistant Professor

Office: SF 531

Phone Number: 510.885.2948

E-mail: bita.astanehasl@csueastbay.edu

Dr. Bita Astaneh Asl joined California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) in the Fall of 2021. She graduated with Ph.D. and MSc degrees in civil engineering with an emphasis on construction, energy, and sustainable infrastructure engineering from the University of Washington (UW). She also has an MSc degree in geotechnical engineering from the K. N. Toosi University of Technology, where she completed her BS studies in civil engineering. Prior to joining CSUEB, Dr. Astaneh Asl was a Lecturer at UW and had a combination of eight years of research experience in construction and geotechnical engineering. She has conducted research studies on the applications of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Extended Reality (XR) in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry, as well as foundation and earthquake engineering. She has worked in research projects funded by National Science Foundation (NSF), Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER), National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), Sound Transit, CSUEB CSR SSDE, CSUEB RSCA, UW Innovation Research Award, and UW Green Seeds Fund, as well as unfunded projects in collaboration with AEC industry partners. Dr. Astaneh Asl has instructed various undergraduate, graduate, and professional courses since 2014. She has gained industrial experience as a Project Engineer at W. G. Clark Construction, a Construction Claim Analyst at McMillen Jacobs Associates, and a COBie Specialist at UW Capital Projects Office.

Roger Doering, Ph.D., Assistant Professor

Office: SF 534 or SC N237

Phone Number: 510.885.4192

E-mail: roger.doering@csueastbay.edu

Dr. Roger Doering, earned his B.S. in Systems Engineering at Case Western Reserve University; an M.S. in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley. While still an undergraduate, he worked for a Cleveland Heights start-up, Datac Inc., as the fourth employee, where he programmed several different minicomputers in assembly language, to serve in embedded systems. These projects used no outside software, and so included real-time operating systems, floating-point emulation, byte-code interpreters, device drivers as well as user interfaces.
While still pursuing his masters degree, started another corporation along with four other students and two professors. That company, Digitial Electronics Corp. (Deeco), designed and prototyped the first commercial development system for the Intel 4004 microprocessor. A later product was the first computer in a briefcase, using the M6800, and featured a single line display, a keyboard, a printer and a tape drive for storage. The display component became a successful product and was the first of many vacuum-fluorescent displays and thin film electroluminescent display systems.
Later Deeco became a subsidiary of Chemetrics Corp., designing their micro-processor based blood chemistry analysis programs. Chemetrics was acquired by Millipore, bundled with another subsidiary and sold again. This combined company changed hands a few more times before he left, for Technicron Controls Inc., a contract engineering company in Berkeley. TCI later was renamed as Integrated Automation Inc., and moved to Bay Farm Isle in Alameda. After three years of very collaborative work, leading design teams as project manager, he returned to Deeco, as V.P. of Research and Development, to engineer the touch screen display unit, for which three U.S. patents were awarded. After Deeco was sold, Doering returned to Berkeley to earn the Ph.D. and in 2001 started teaching at Cal State East Bay in the Computer Science Department. He founded the Computer Engineering degree program in 2008 and continues to expand the School of Engineering.
Dr. Doering is married, and has three married children, and one grandchild. He is still active in the Boy Scout program, where he is currently vice-chair of the local district. He has been a member of the IEEE since his undergraduate studies, and currently serves as chair of the local section, as well as the advisor to the campus student branch. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu.

Cristian Gaedicke, Ph.D. P.E., Interim Department Chair

Office: SF 514

Phone Number: 510.885.2208

E-mail: cristian.gaedicke@csueastbay.edu

Dr. Cristian Gaedicke earned a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 and is a Licensed Professional Engineer in the State of Texas since 2011. His research interests are sustainable construction materials, infrastructure, construction engineering, and engineering education. Dr. Gaedicke has extensive background in sustainable construction materials, airfield pavements, and transportation infrastructure. He has worked on federally and state funded research by various agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, Chicago O’Hare Airport Modernization Plan, and Texas Department of Transportation. Dr. Gaedicke is a member of the American Concrete Institute (ACI) and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE).

Saeid Motavalli, Ph.D. P.E., Professor

Office: SF 516

Phone Number: 510.885.2654

E-mail: saeid.motavalli@csueastbay.edu

Dr. Saeid Motavalli has extensive industrial and academic experience. Before joining NIU he served as a senior engineer in Biomechanics Corporation of America; an assistant professor at Wichita State University, and an associate professor at Northern Illinois University. Dr. Motavalli's area of research is manufacturing systems. In particular, he is interested in problems related to process flow analysis, facilities planning, workplace design/ergonomics, and manufacturing measurement. He has worked on federally funded research by various federal agencies such as NSF and FAA. He has also received funding from industrial sources such as Caterpillar, Motorola, NICOR Gas, Cessna Aircraft, and several smaller manufacturing companies. The projects involved process flow analysis, production planning and control, facilities planning, CAD modeling, and ergonomics. His teaching interest is in the areas of, computer-aided manufacturing, production planning and control, facilities planning, and manufacturing measurement.

Roya Nasimi, Ph.D., Assistant Professor

Office: SF 525

Phone Number: 510.885.4125

E-mail: roya.nasimi@csueastbay.edu

Dr. Nasimi joined CSUEB as an assistant professor of civil engineering in the Fall of 2023. Prior to this role, she was a postdoc at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where she served as a lecturer and conducted research during this appointment. She completed her Ph.D. with distinction in structural engineering at the University of New Mexico. She earned her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in structural engineering and civil engineering from The University of Tabriz.  Her unique combination of knowledge in structural engineering, experience in interdisciplinary research, and teaching expertise informs her efforts to leverage cutting-edge technology for sustainable, intelligent infrastructure systems. This work contributes to a stronger economy and a more equitable community. Her research interests include, but are not limited to, structural health monitoring; computer vision; artificial intelligence; and machine learning for monitoring and assessing aging infrastructure. Through her research efforts, Dr. Nasimi collaborated with researchers from different disciplines to design, develop, and leverage both low-cost and high-end systems and sensors ranging from lasers to visual and contact sensors to monitor infrastructures, specifically bridges. She has led in and conducted numerous full-scale bridge experiments to measure the response and changes in bridges before and after imposed damages. She has worked on interdisciplinary and collaborative research in Nebraska, funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, focused on various aspects of operational management and technology development, including response measurement, damage detection, and creating data pipelines to enhance infrastructure safety. In the past, she has worked on research projects supported by the Transportation Research Board (TRB), The Transportation Consortium of South-Central States (Tran-SET), and the New Mexico Consortium. Dr. Nasimi is serving as a committee member for two standing committees at TRB.

Farzad Shahbodaghlou, Ph.D., Professor

Office: VBT 224

Phone Number: 510.885.2781

E-mail: farzad.shahbodaghlou@csueastbay.edu

Professor Farzad Shahbodaghlou has over 25 years of experience as an academician, practitioner and consultant in the construction industry. He holds masters and PhD degrees from Purdue University. He is the founding director of the Construction Management Program at California State University East Bay. He is also the president of PIC (Process Improvement Consulting), offering the industry consulting services. His area of specialty is process improvement in the field of construction. Prior to CSUEB, he was a tenured associate professor at Bradley University, where he received the Outstanding Faculty Award in 1996 from the Department of Civil Engineering and Construction. Following his tenure at Bradley, he moved to the industry and was with DPR construction, Inc. until 2002. After six years of full time consulting and part time instruction at San Jose State University, he arrived at CSUEB’s School of Engineering to start the Construction Management Program. He considers growing the construction management program from 6 students in 2009 to over two hundred students in 2015 his greatest accomplishment to date.

Alex Sumarsono, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Office: SF 515

E-mail: alex.sumarsono@csueastbay.edu

Alex Sumarsono received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Mississippi State University.  He has taught various engineering and computer science courses at Azusa Pacific University and Santa Clara University. Dr. Sumarsono has more than 30 years of industry experience as Senior Manager and Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation, Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems and other technology companies.  He was one of the leaders in research and development organizations. He has led geographically dispersed global teams to develop products employing cutting-edge technologies for multi-billion dollar telecommunication and networking market. Dr. Sumarsono’s specialization is machine learning and computational intelligence with applications in hyperspectral image processing and analysis, and in computer networking involving network security and traffic management.

James Tandon, Ph.D., Associate Professor

Office: SF 532 or SC N237

Phone Number: 510.885.4792

E-mail: james.tandon@csueastbay.edu

James Tandon joined CSU East Bay in Fall of 2015. He has industrial experience in VLSI architecture design, VLSI CAD software design, embedded systems design, and user interface design at Microsemi SoC, Intuitive Surgical, and Mentor Graphics. He also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tokyo. His research interests today include stochastic data converter design techniques for time-to-digital and analog-to-digital converters, timing algorithms for interconnection networks, and power optimization methods of multicore multiprocessor architectures. He has been involved in the design of several custom integrated circuits. A sample of these includes a stochastic, equivalent-time sampling analog-to-digital converter for SERDES signal analysis, a stochastic time-to-digital converter with tunable resolution and down to 183fs resolution, and a prototype processor for a power optimizing multicore, multiprocessor platform. He has implemented several computer-aided design algorithms for the analysis of VLSI systems as well.

Helen Y. Zong, Ph.D. P.E., Professor

Office: VBT 226

Phone Number: 510.885.4482

E-mail: helen.zong@csueastbay.edu

Dr. Zong has many years of experience in higher education and manufacturing industries. Before joining CSUH, Dr. Zong had served as an associate professor at St. Cloud State University, an assistant professor at Jianghan Petroleum Institute and a mechanical engineer in China. During her professional career, Dr. Zong has worked on many research and consulting projects with industries, such as UPS, Fingerhut, Caterpillar, KOMO Machines, Blow Molded Specialist, etc. Dr. Zong's professional specialties include manufacturing processes and improvements, manufacturing system simulations, facilities planning and designs, material handling system design, quality assurance and design of experiments, production planning and control systems, production sequence and scheduling, expert system development, computer-integrated manufacturing, and operations research. Dr. Zong's teaching interests are in the areas of manufacturing system simulations, production planning and control, facilities planning and designs, quality assurance, and engineering economy.

Emeritus Faculty

Dr. David Bowen

E-mail: david.bowen@csueastbay.edu

Dr. David Bowen is an emeritus professor in the School of Engineering at CSUEB. After serving as a US Peace Corps Volunteer he earned a doctorate from UC, Berkeley, were he also taught as a visiting faculty member. Dr. Bowen served as corporate-wide Education and Training Manager for a global Industrial Engineering consulting firm, and then as founder and Managing Partner at BOPTIMAL Enterprises consulting. He is an experienced educator, researcher, manager and consultant with expertise in Human work systems, Engineering education, Capacity modeling, Human Factors Engineering, and Creating, training and facilitating improvement teams. He conducted research in Europe, Asia, North America and Africa focusing on team performance, manufacturing best practices, appropriate technologies and engineering education. He served as a panelist for the NSF, Fulbright, the US Dept. of Education, and on external audit teams accrediting universities in the Middle East. He served as a Fulbright Scholar at Kenyatta University, Kenya and at Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania. He served as E. Kika De La Garza Fellow for USDA in Wash DC and has been involved as a volunteer agricultural mechanization Expert in USAID supported humanitarian engineering projects taking him to Kenya, Burundi, Nigeria, Mozambique and Senegal.

Dr. Farnaz Ganjeizadeh

E-mail: farnaz.ganjeizadeh@csueastbay.edu

Dr. Ganjeizadeh, Professor Emerita of Engineering and Former Department Chair earned her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from Syracuse University in 1977 and 1979, respectively, she pursued her doctoral studies, completing her Ph.D. in 1997. Her research interests included machine learning, global modeling optimization, reliability and design of experiment, forecasting and risk assessment, supply chain and project lifecycle, and project management.

Known for fostering supportive and stimulating learning environments, she empowered students to think critically, solve complex problems, and pursue innovative research. She actively mentored students, particularly women and underrepresented minorities, in their academic and professional endeavors.

Her dedication to student success was evident in her role as a mentor, advisor, and sponsor for various student organizations and competitions. She was passionate about education and committed to creating inclusive learning environments that catered to the diverse needs of her students. By combining her academic expertise with practical industry experience, she equipped students with the knowledge and skills necessary for success in their chosen careers. Her goal was to inspire students to reach their full potential and embark on fulfilling journeys.