Maryam Parsa is an assistant professor in the ECE department at George Mason University. Prior to joining Mason, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Beyond Moore Computing group. She received her PhD in Electrical and computer engineering from the Center for Brain-Inspired Computing (C-BRIC) at Purdue University in December 2020 with a prestigious four-year Intel Corporation, and Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) PhD fellowship.
Parsa has broad interests in the areas of neuromorphic computing, neural architecture search, and Bayesian optimization across the full stack of materials, devices, circuits, systems, algorithms, and applications. Her research involves developing causal and physics-based machine learning and Bayesian optimization to accelerate materials discovery. Further, in her focus on neuromorphic computing, her goal is to not only enable accurate, fast, energy-efficient, and resilient intelligence at the edge through algorithm-hardware codesign, but also to develop novel hierarchical learning/training approaches based on Bayesian optimization, evolutionary optimization, and synaptic learning rules. She is interested in a wide range of applications such as computational neuroscience, smart healthcare diagnosis, and cyber-physical systems.
Tolga Soyata received his B.S. degree in Electrical and Communications Engineering from Istanbul Technical University in 1988, M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1992 and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Rochester in 2000. He was an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Rochester ECE Department between 2008 and 2016 and Associate Professor at SUNY Albany ECE between 2016 and 2019. He was a senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins University ECE Department in 2020 before joining GMU as an Associate Professor in 2021. His teaching interests include Computer Architecture, CMOS VLSI ASIC Design, FPGA-based System Design, and GPU Architecture and Programming. He has authored two books as well as two dozen journals and 30 conference papers, primarily in ACM and IEEE. His research interests include Cyber Physical Systems, Digital Health, and FPGA- and GPU-based high-performance computing. He is a senior member of both IEEE and ACM.
Samuel Heuer is a senior mechanical engineering student specializing in thermodynamics at George Mason University. Mr. Heuer works as a Resident Assistant for Mason's STEM learning community and a Learning Assistant for the mathematics department. Additionally, he works as a Volunteer Firefighter at the Dale City Volunteer Fire Department. Samuel's eclectic background fits perfectly within the ideology of Insane Inventors, and his management skills make him a valued member of the advisory board.
