Damian Valles, Ph.D. – Principal Investigator
Associate Professor of the Ingram School of Engineering and Faculty Director of the High-Performance Engineering (HiPE) research group. The HiPE group focuses on computational research solutions in engineering fields that require high-performance computing (HPC), machine learning, embedded systems, and visualization. Engineering designs have also expanded with other STEM and health science fields. Dr. Valles’ work has focused on the applications of emotion classification for children with ASD and the firefighting data collection design. The HiPE group recently inherited virtual and augmented visualization research and development equipment.
Ting Liu, Ph.D.
Dean of Graduate Studies at Texas A&M University-San Antonio and Professor of Counseling, Health, and Kinesiology. Dr. Liu’s research interests focus on applied and translational research of great significance to children with autism spectrum disorder, their families, and professionals who work with this population. She has supervised over 3,500 hours of undergraduate and graduate student volunteer, internship, and practicum time each summer. Dr. Liu has a track record of involving undergraduates in her research and ensuring they are integral to her research team. She has provided supervision and guidance to more than 300 undergraduate and graduate students in various capacities, including their theses, culminating projects, independent studies, internships, and fieldwork. Many of her students have published peer-reviewed journal articles, presented at national conferences, and been accepted to the master’s and doctoral programs. Furthermore, Dr. Liu has made significant contributions to the academic community by establishing a student organization and serving as its lead faculty advisor. She also initiated a peer-mentoring program to foster a sense of connection among students, faculty, and mentors, assisting students in integrating into the program and university community, offering support to help students meet academic expectations, and contributing to the retention of minority students.
Maria Resendiz, Ph.D., CCC-SLP
Associate Professor in the Communication Disorders Department in the College of Health Professions. Dr. Resendiz runs the Bilingual Language Acquisition Brains (BLAB) Lab research group, focusing on providing evidence-based speech-language therapy to populations with limited access to speech-language pathologists locally and internationally. Dr. Resendiz has collaborated with Engineering and other Health Professionals to create resources and identify practices to make speech-language therapy accessible. Dr. Resendiz’s collaborations have focused on creating an app that utilizes advanced machine learning and facial recognition with computer vision algorithms and a dataset collected in the BLAB Lab to help people with ASD. The app identifies the emotion of the conversational partner so people with ASD can have successful social interactions. She collaborates with Austin Smiles and Instituto Salvadoreno Rehabilitacion Integral (ISRI) [Salvadoran Institute for Integral Rehabilitation]. She also researches best practices for providing speech therapy to children who have received cleft palate in countries where speech-language pathology is not a profession.
Semih Aslan, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of the Ingram School of Engineering. Dr. Aslan has worked as a Senior FPGA Design Engineer with Motorola LTE Division and as a post-doctoral researcher at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Dr. Aslan worked with minority students for over ten years as a full-time instructor on the west side of Chicago. Dr. Aslan is the founding director of the System Modeling and Renewable Technology (SMART) Lab at the Ingram School of Engineering at Texas State. His research interests include renewable energy, sensor modeling, signal conditioning, embedded systems, and hardware optimization.
Rachel Koldenhoven Rolfe, Ph.D., ATC
Assistant Professor of Health and Human Performance and faculty co-director of the Clinical Biomechanics & Exercise Science Laboratory. Dr. Koldenhoven Rolfe’s research focuses on biomechanical assessment of gait and functional movements, biofeedback interventions to address biomechanical alterations, rehabilitation techniques, and populations with a history of lower extremity injuries. Dr. Koldenhoven Rolfe has mentored 15 graduate students completing a culminating project or thesis during her first five years at Texas State University. These projects have resulted in 8 refereed conference proceedings, 7 national and international conference presentations, and 3 peer-reviewed published manuscripts. One student has been accepted into a Ph.D. program.
John Farrell III, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Health and Human Performance and faculty co-director of The Clinical Biomechanics & Exercise Physiology Laboratory. Dr. Farrell’s research program focuses on developing appropriate exercise testing and prescriptions for persons with multiple sclerosis to manage both physical disability and cognitive impairment. This includes developing and evaluating adapted exercise modalities for those with a severe physical disability. During his first year, Dr. Farrell worked with three undergraduate students on three separate systematic reviews to inform the students’ future graduate theses. All three of these students were accepted into graduate programs for the Fall of 2021.
Berenice de la Cruz, Ph.D.
Assistant professor and inaugural Program Coordinator for the Applied Behavior Analysis Program (ABA) at Texas A&M University-San Antonio (A&M-SA). Since 2001, Dr. de la Cruz has dedicated her career to supporting individuals with autism and their families across various settings (i.e., schools, homes, clinics, and communities). Her roles have included teacher, behavior analyst, supervisor, director, and professor. Dr. de la Cruz’s research and practice center on public policy advocacy, ethics, cultural adaptations, systems of support, and evaluating the application of ABA techniques by parents, caregivers, teachers, and professionals to assist individuals with developmental disabilities in school, home, and community environments. She has supervised over 60 undergraduate and graduate students in ABA across multiple university programs. Dr. de la Cruz has published peer-reviewed research articles and co-authored book chapters in the fields of developmental disabilities, addictive behaviors, and social cognition.
Marcelo Menezes De Carvalho, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in the Ingram School of Engineering at Texas State University. Dr. Marcelo Carvalho is the Director of the Sustainable High-Performing Intelligent Networks (SHINe) Lab, whose mission is to carry out research on next-generation communications networks by focusing on the design, modeling, optimization, and performance evaluation of mechanisms, protocols, and algorithms that deliver the efficient usage of network resources while meeting the applications’ quality of service requirements with minimal carbon footprint. Currently, the SHINe lab is developing research on Internet of Things (IoT) networks based on machine learning tools, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), and simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technologies. Additionally, the lab is working towards solutions for the Metaverse by looking into efficient streaming of immersive (AR/VR/XR) content over wireless networks and their applications.
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 2022-2028