Abstract: Introduce the graduate seminar series and welcome students.
Speaker Bio: Biography: Sarika Khushalani Solanki received B.E. and M.E. degrees from India in 1998 and 2000 respectively. She received Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Mississippi State University, USA in 2006. She is currently an Associate Professor in Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, since August 2009. Prior to that, she worked for Open Systems International Inc, Minneapolis, MN as a Senior Engineer for three years. She has served as reviewer in National Science Foundation and Department of Energy and is past president of IEEE Distribution Systems Analysis Subcommittee and IEEE Career Promotion and Workforce Development Subcommittee and is editor of Transactions in Smart Grid. She is a recipient of Honda Fellowship award and NSF Career Award. Her research interests are Smart Grid, Power Distribution System, computer applications in power system analysis and power system control.
Speaker: Martin Dunlap
Date: September 14th, 2026
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Place: ESB 501
Abstract: He will introduce the services and resources available through the WVU Libraries. These library resources may be critical to your graduate research.
Speaker Bio: He joined WVU in 1998 and has spent 10+ years working in the swamps of Florida as an environmental consultant. Since then he has worked in libraries first in Cleveland, Ohio and then here at WVU in various capacities. He recently got promoted to be the Engineering Librarian at WVU.
Speaker: WVU IT
Date: NA
Time: NA
Place: At your desk
Abstract: There is an online plagiarism tutorial at https://wvu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6W3rGjsAaEenYgd
Here are the steps:
View videos.
Take a self-test.
Repeat steps for each module.
Take the Plagiarism Avoidance Test.
How do you progress through this tutorial?
View videos or read material in a module. Take a self-test after reading and viewing materials in a module. This self-test is for practice and taking it will open the next module. Repeat steps for each module, five modules in all. After viewing / reading the material in each module and taking the self-tests, take the Plagiarism Avoidance Test.
Speaker: Rajesh Medatati
Date: Monday, October 12, 2026
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Place: https://wvu.zoom.us/j/9188836315
Abstract: Enterprise AI adoption is accelerating rapidly, yet failure rates have worsened. Industry research shows that 42% of companies abandoned most AI initiatives in 2025 alone not because the model failed, but because the integration layer connecting AI to real business systems was never properly engineered.
This talk introduces AI-Ready Integration Architecture, a five-layer practitioner framework derived from designing and delivering enterprise AI automation systems in large-scale production environments. The framework addresses five engineering dimensions that university curricula rarely cover: event-driven ingestion design, confidence-based human escalation, orchestration and decision logic, transactional write-back, and audit explainability. The talk also introduces the tribal knowledge problem, a data quality challenge endemic to enterprise systems that makes AI unreliable regardless of model quality and presents it as an open and underexplored research problem.
Graduate students will leave with a concrete understanding of what enterprise AI looks like beyond the lab, four open research problems worth pursuing, and a practitioner's perspective on where the most consequential engineering work in AI is happening today.
Bio: Rajesh Medatati is a Senior Integration Architect and Integration Lead at one of the largest CPG manufacturing enterprises in the United States, where he leads enterprise AI automation, cloud modernization, and integration architecture programs. With over 20 years of progressive experience spanning manufacturing, finance, human capital management, and higher education, he has established a track record of delivering large-scale digital transformation programs that consistently exceed industry benchmarks.
Earlier in his career, Rajesh led enterprise integration programs for a technology services firm delivering solutions to geospatial industry clients, managing a team of 15+ integration engineers across multiple acquired-company consolidations. Prior to that, he implemented Oracle Process Integration Packs on Oracle SOA Suite for more than 15 enterprise clients across diverse industries.
Rajesh holds a Master of Computer Applications from Osmania University, India, along with certifications in enterprise architecture, cloud platforms, and AI across AWS, Azure, and Oracle environments. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and an active contributor to the Oracle Quest community as a speaker and knowledge committee member. A related manuscript on AI-ready enterprise integration architecture is currently under review at IEEE IT Professional.
His research and professional interests span enterprise AI automation, integration architecture, and cloud modernization.
Speaker: Keith E. Cook
Date: Monday, October 26, 2026
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Place: ESB 501
Abstract: Over 15 million people in the US suffer from chronic lung disease, causing 6.9 million ER visits and 180,000 deaths each year. Unfortunately, there are only 3,400 lung transplants each year and no other means of restorative therapies. This shortcoming has motivated our efforts to create a means of permanent, at home artificial lung support. The two biggest roadblocks to achieving this are (1) the large, heavy systems used to support patients within the intensive care unit and (2) the thrombogenicity of the artificial lungs within these systems. To remedy this, the Cook lab works on computational design, construction, and testing of compact, lightweight, biocompatible artificial lungs and the development of biomaterials and pharmaceutical approaches to create artificial lung anticoagulation without causing patient bleeding. Lastly, we have begun work on biofabricated lungs engineered from fully biologic materials.
Bio: Dr. Cook is the David Edward Schramm Professor and Department Head of Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). At CMU, he also serves as the Director of the Bioengineered Organs Initiative and the Transforming Transplant initiative. Prior to his appointment at CMU, Dr. Cook was a Research Associate Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Surgery at the University of Michigan. As a student, Dr. Cook obtained a BSE in both Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science from Michigan and an MS and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University. Dr. Cook’s research focuses on the application of biomedical engineering to the treatment of lung disease. His primary research focus is the development of permanent replacement lungs for destination therapy. This work extends into computational modeling and device design, development of novel biomaterials and new drug approaches to reduce blood coagulation within these devices, and in-vitro and in-vivo biomaterials and artificial lung testing. His research also focuses on design and biofabrication of tissue-based lungs and design and ex-vivo organ repair. Dr. Cook is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).
Speaker: Anand Mishra
Date: November 9, 2026
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Place: ESB 501 and https://wvu.zoom.us/j/9188836315
Abstract: Living organisms move, sense, and adapt using soft, multifunctional bodies in which structure, sensing, and actuation are deeply intertwined. Conventional robots, by contrast, separate these functions into rigid parts and central controllers. This seminar presents ongoing work in the Robiotics Laboratory at WVU on developing life-like soft robots. I will first discuss soft actuation, including hydrogel actuators that cool themselves through autonomic perspiration, much as mammals sweat. Next, I will show how embedding and fusing multiple sensors in soft bodies enables agricultural robots for in-field manipulation, such as a soft gripper that harvests delicate strawberries. I will then introduce biohybrid robots that use living fungal mycelia as sensors and controllers. Finally, I will present new approaches to robot fabrication, including multi-material 3D printing and robotic additive manufacturing, that build sensing, actuation, and living materials directly into a robot’s body.
Speaker Bio: Anand Kumar Mishra is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering at West Virginia University (since Summer 2025) and an Adjunct Professor in the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. He leads the Robiotics Laboratory (robioticslab.org), which focuses on biomimetic soft robotics, living materials, robotic additive manufacturing, and agricultural robotics. He earned his Ph.D. with honors from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and the Italian Institute of Technology, receiving the 2018 Best Ph.D. Thesis Award from the Italian National Bioengineering Group. He then completed postdoctoral research with Dr. Robert Shepherd at Cornell University. His research uses plants and fungi as model systems for new robotic designs and materials. He has published more than 35 peer-reviewed papers, including in Science Robotics, PNAS, and Advanced Functional Materials, and is a Co-PI on the ARPA-E GOPHURRS program. He was recently selected for the New York Academy of Sciences Interstellar Initiative and has received travel support from Regional I-Corps, the NSF Foundational Research in Robotics (FRR) program, and NASA EPSCoR. His work has been covered by CNN, the BBC, Scientific American, and Forbes.
Speaker: Andy Chan
Date: November 16, 2026
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Place: ESB 501 and https://wvu.zoom.us/j/9188836315
Abstract: Every week in the epilepsy monitoring unit we record directly from the human brain, sometimes from hundreds of intracranial contacts and single neurons at once, in patients who are awake, talking, and living through seizures. These recordings exist to guide surgery, but they are also one of the richest neural datasets anywhere, and most of what they contain goes unused. In this talk I will describe how our research group at the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute is turning clinical neurophysiology into an engineering problem. I will cover three threads: stereo EEG and single unit recordings used to map seizure networks and the frontal-limbic circuits that drive depression in epilepsy; SeizEAR, our in-ear EEG wearable for long term seizure monitoring, which we recently published in Sensors; and brain-computer interfaces, including our role as a national evaluation site for a high density cortical interface and an NSF funded augmented reality BCI for aphasia rehabilitation. Through our research results and interactive discussions, attendees will gain practical insights into human neural signal processing and brain computer interface device development.
Speaker Bio: Ho Wing (Andy) Chan, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Neurology and an epileptologist at the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, where his clinical practice centers on the surgical evaluation of drug resistant epilepsy. He founded and directs the Neural Circuits and Neurotechnology Research Group, which studies human intracranial electrophysiology, neuromodulation (DBS, RNS, focused ultrasound, and VNS), seizure detection wearables, in-ear EEG, brain-computer interfaces for communication and rehabilitation, and drug discovery for treatment resistant epilepsy. Dr. Chan completed neurology residency, epilepsy fellowship, and an NIH T32 research fellowship at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He is board certified in Neurology and Epilepsy by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. His current work is supported by an NSF BRAIN pilot award and a WVU Center for Foundational Neuroscience Research and Education pilot award. Also, his group works closely with faculty and students in the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.