Faculty Collaborations

The UTEP PNNL partnership is designed to have a direct influence on national and global scientific research. To accomplish this, researchers from both institutions are teaming to search for solutions to some of our most pressing national problems.

UTEP faculty and PNNL researchers are forming collaborations in a variety of ways: from research projects and presentations to formalized joint appointments. If you are a UTEP faculty or PNNL researcher, we encourage you to join the collaboration site today to begin building research opportunities and connections.

Research Collaborations

As part of the partnership, UTEP faculty are invited to create a profile that showcases your research interests, skills, and project goals so that PNNL researchers can identify projects that align with your interests. By doing so, we are connecting needed capabilities and interests that enable UTEP and PNNL to advance their scientific work.

Joint Appointments

Joint appointments between PNNL and UTEP provide new and diverse opportunities for researchers to expand their knowledge and impact. Incoming and outgoing appointments elevate the productivity of researchers at both institutions, providing strategic capabilities that accelerate the scientific impact.

Joint Appointments between UTEP and PNNL

	Julien Chaput UTEP Assistant Professor Earth, Environment and Resource Sciences Dr. Julien Chaput specializes in optimization and inverse methods as they relate to various applied mathematics problems inside and outside of geosciences. He has several research branches, including volcano seismology, cryospheric seismology, atmospheric EM imaging, and medical physics.
	Tony Chiang PNNL Data Scientist Dr. Chiang is the Pure Mathematics in Machine Learning Thrust Lead for the Mathematics for Artificial Learning in Science (MARS) initiative. His efforts are concentrated with the geometry of the loss landscape and spectral machine learning theory. In addition to pure mathematics, he works in the analysis of variance of machine learning models.
	Tegan Emerson PNNL Data Scientist Dr. Tegan Emerson is a senior data scientist in PNNL's National Security Directorate with a background in geometric and topological data analysis. Emerson leads PNNL's Mathematics of Data Science Dragontail team, which researches the intersection of topology, algebra, and geometry in data science with deep learning and artificial intelligence.
	Chintalapalle Ramana UTEP Faculty, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Director, Center for Advanced Materials Research Dr. Ramana is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Dr. Ramana's research expertise is towards developing and/or engineering advanced structural materials for application in energy production, storage and conversion, utilization, and management.
	Shuttha Shutthanandan PNNL Material Scientist Dr. Shuttha Shutthanandan is a materials scientist in PNNL’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Division and the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) user program. Shutthanandan joined PNNL and EMSL in 1999. He is responsible for the helium ion microscope and imaging x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy capabilities at EMSL.
	Miguel Velez-Reyes UTEP Professor Department Chair \| Electrical and Computer Engineering Computational Science Dr. Miguel Velez-Reyes is Professor and Chair of the UTEP Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests are in integrating physical, statistical, and machine-learning approaches to develop methodologies for information extraction from natural and engineered systems using minimally intrusive or remote sensing techniques.
	Amy Wagler UTEP Associate Professor Mathematical Sciences \| Computational Science Dr. Amy Wagler is a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). She directs the Data Analytics Lab at UTEP and directs the doctoral program in data science.