ECE Welcomes Two New Faculty Members

Associate Professor Gilad Kusne joins ECE from the Department of Materials Science. He is also an Associate Researcher with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he has been twice awarded the NIST Bronze Award, the highest internal award for NIST employees.

His research aims to accelerate the design, characterization, and optimization of electronic devices and materials. He leads the machine learning team of an international, cross-disciplinary effort building autonomous research systems towards these goals. For these systems, machine learning performs experiment design, execution (in the lab and in silico), and anaysis.

Kusne received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In addition, he is the lead founder and organizer of the annual Materials Informatics competition and the Machine Learning for Materials Research Bootcamp and Workshop (now in its 11th year)—educating next generation and mid-career engineers and scientists in machine learning

Associate Professor Matt Landreman was previously a Research Scientist with the UMD Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP). He received his B.S. degree from Swarthmore College and a M.S. degree from Oxford University. He earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011.

Landreman’s research centers on analytical and computational methods for design optimization of magnetically confined plasmas. This work is largely motivated by fusion energy, but extends also to areas of applied mathematics, plasma physics, and other applications of magnets

He also studies the role of symmetry in magnetically confined plasmas, using both theory and high-performance computing. Much of his group's work concerns the stellarator, a plasma trap that uses magnetic fields with carefully designed shaping. The stellarator is a candidate configuration for fusion energy, as well as a general charged particle trap. Other research interests include plasma turbulence, optimization, and adjoint methods.

Published September 14, 2026