Over the past several years, a number of talented professors have joined the College of Engineering faculty. Following is a brief look at some of these professors, who are helping to advance the COE to higher levels of excellence in research and education. Look for more new faculty profiles in the issue to come.

Assistant Professor Dr. Valerie Maier-Speredelozzi

Dr. Valerie Maier-Speredelozzi, assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering, joined the College of Engineering staff in 2003. She has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her master’s in mechanical and industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan before receiving her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan as well.
Maier-Speredelozzi’s research interests include manufacturing system design, supply chain management and manufacturing biomedical applications. She said, “Products need to be manufactured and distributed to customers in the most efficient way possible, ensuring high quality and low costs. Customers today demand a greater variety of product features which change more frequently than in the earlier days of manufacturing. In order to maintain competitive advantages, companies must become more responsive to consumer demand, so my research involves developing principles and procedures that will enable them to be successful in the new manufacturing environment.”
In addition to her abundant research and education, Maier-Speredelozzi is a member of the Society of Women Engineers, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and the American Society for Engineering Education and the Institute of Industrial Engineers.
She is teaching Industrial Engineering Design I this fall and plans to develop a graduate course in lean manufacturing.

Assistant Professor Resit Sendag
The electrical engineering department at URI welcomed Assistant Professor Resit Sendag in the fall of 2003. Sendag joined the faculty from the University of Minnesota, where he earned his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering. He earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees at universities in Turkey, his homeland.
Sendag’s research interests are centered around high-performance computer architecture, with an emphasis on high-performance memory systems for uniprocessor and multiprocessor architectures. Specifically, Sendag says he hopes his research will lead to significantly improved computer performance.
“Computer designers are faced with an increasing processor-memory performance gap, which has been the primary obstacle to improved computer system performance for years,” noted Sendag. ”My current research focuses on designing ways of improving memory performance through the addition of novel functionalities in the memory system.”
In addition to research, Sendag teaches Digital Computer Design, Introduction to Computing Systems, Computer Architecture, Advanced Computer Architecture, and Instruction Level Parallelism, among other courses.
Although he’s only been at URI a short while, Sendag has adapted to his new environment quickly and well. “I like the collegial environment in our department and the collaboration between the faculty,” he said.