The College of Engineering is marking two changes in departmental leadership this fall.
ҹɫÊÓƵ President Brian Sandoval in November appointed Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) Professor Shamik Sengupta as the next CSE Department chair. His term will begin July 1, 2026; he replaces outgoing CSE chair Professor Eelke Folmer, whose term will end June 30, 2026.
Sandoval also named Electrical & Biomedical Engineering (EBME) Professor Bahram Parvin as the EBME department chair. Parvin’s tenure as chair began in November.
“I look forward to working with Dr. Sengupta and Dr. Parvin as chairs of their respective departments,” Engineering Dean Tom Weller said. “As the College works toward continued excellence in education and research, I’m excited for all that we will accomplish together. I am also grateful for the service and dedication of our outgoing chairs, Dr. Folmer in CSE and Dr. Sami Fadali in EBME.”
About Shamik Sengupta
Sengupta holds Engineering’s Ralph E. and Rose A. Hoeper Professorship and is the executive director of the University’s Cybersecurity Center. His expertise in game theory, wireless networking and cybersecurity is the foundation for his current work on cyber-physical systems and adversarial modeling.
He joined the University in 2013, coming from City University of New York, where he received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award in 2012. During his tenure in Reno, Sengupta has been the recipient of 12 NSF grants; the CSE Best Researcher award in 2016, 2018 and 2022; and Engineering’s Excellence Award in 2018. In 2018, his alma mater, the University of Central Florida, honored Sengupta with its College of Engineering and Computer Science Distinguished Alumni Honor award. He is also Honorary Commander of the 152 Communications Flight at the Nevada Air National Guard Base, a distinction awarded in 2022.
About Bahram Parvin
Parvin has been with the University since 2014, working in biomedical engineering. His lab investigates therapeutic strategies aimed at reprogramming the tumor microenvironment and develops machine learning technologies for bioimaging, high-throughput drug screening and immune architype characterization.
He has directed the College’s Biomedical Engineering Program since 2015. He has served as a senior scientist at the Pennington Cancer Institute at Renown Health since 2021, holding a joint appointment with the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the College of Medicine. He has over 150 publications and 10 patents.
Before joining the University, Parvin was a principal scientist with the Department of Cancer Biology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.
