New Faculty Hire Conversation Series 2025

Christo K. Thomas received his B.S. in electronics and communication engineering from the National Institute of Technology Calicut, India in 2010, his M.S. in telecommunication engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India in 2012, and his Ph.D. from EURECOM, France in 2020.

He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Virginia Tech from 2022-2025. He is an incoming tenure track assistant professor at Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Worcester, MA, from Aug. 2025.

His research interests include semantic communications, statistical signal processing, trustworthy and resilient AI and networks, and artificial general intelligence (AGI)-native wireless systems. At WPI, he will establish a research group dedicated to building Trustworthy, Resilient, Artificial Intelligence and Networks for next-generation networking and computing systems, called TRAIN Lab.

From 2012 to 2014, he was a staff design engineer on 4G LTE with Broadcom communications, Bangalore, and from 2014 to 2017, he was a design engineer with Intel corporation, Bangalore. During November 2020 till June 2022, he was a staff engineer on 5G modems with wireless research and development division of Qualcomm Inc., Espoo, Finland. He was a recipient of the best student paper award at Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC) 2018, Kalamata, Greece, best paper award at IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing and Communications (ICSCC) 2025, and received third prize for his team titled “Learned Chester” ML5G-PHY channel estimation challenge, as part of the ITU AI/ML in 5G challenge, conducted at NCSU, US, 2020. He had presented multiple tutorials on approximate Bayesian inference techniques at several IEEE conferences (such as the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Conference and the European Signal Processing Conference) and a tutorial on AGI-native networks at IEEE GLOBECOM. He has also edited a Wiley-IEEEPress book on semantic communications and is co-author of a visionary paper on AGI-native networks in Proceedings of IEEE.

Megan Vogt received a B.S. in microbiology from Colorado State University in 2011. She worked as a research associate at Colorado State University for 18 months before deciding to pursue her Ph.D.

In 2019, Vogt earned her Ph.D. in integrative molecular and biomedical science from Baylor College of Medicine. From 2019 to 2025, She worked as a postdoctoral scientist in the lab of Nisha Duggal at Virginia Tech, studying transmission and pathogenesis of mosquito-borne viruses. During her time at Virginia Tech, she received the Young Investigators Award from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, served on the Student/Trainee Leadership Committee for the American Committee of Arthropod-Borne and Zoonotic Viruses, and was a founding member of the Virginia Tech Postdoctoral Association.

In August 2025, Vogt joined the Department of Biology at Western Carolina University. This semester, she will be teaching Introduction of Cellular and Molecular Biology to first-year students and setting up her research lab.

Yanzhu Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Florida State University.

Her research interests include quantum algorithms and quantum simulation, quantum information processing in realistic environments, including techniques like quantum error correction and error mitigation, and interplay of quantum computing, symmetry, and topology in condensed matter physics.

She received her PhD degree from Stony Brook University and was a postdoctoral researcher working with Prof. Sophia Economou and Prof. Edwin Barnes at Virginia Tech.