Two new faculty members join CSL and ECE ILLINOIS

Two new faculty members, Michael Bailey and Lara Waldrop, joined the CSL and ECE ILLINOIS faculty this fall.

Michael Bailey

Michael Donald Bailey joined ECE ILLINOIS as an associate professor after working as a research associate professor and co-director of the Network and Security Research Group at the University of Michigan. He joins the University of Illinois after a successful search for a new, tenure-track position. Bailey is a part of CSL’s reliable and secure systems research area, as well as a researcher with the Information Trust Institute.

“I am very excited to be here,” Bailey said. “This move made sense on so many levels. Illinois clearly has an excellent reputation in engineering, but I also grew up in the Chicago suburbs and the opportunity to work at my alma mater (he earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 1992) feels like coming home”

His research at Michigan focused on the security and availability of complex distributed systems. He plans to continue that research here at Illinois, and is looking forward to collaborating with other Illinois Engineering faculty members.

“One of our jobs as security people is to think critically about the systems we create,” he said. “We need to step back and ask ourselves is this system secure? What are we protecting? From whom? At what cost?"

Lara Waldrop

Assistant professor Lara Waldrop previously worked as a research scientist and visiting lecturer at ECE ILLINOIS and joined CSL as a part of CSL's remote sensing and space science research group. Her research is focused on the development of novel ground- and space-based sensing modalities for estimation of key physical parameters of the near-earth space plasma environment, with application to predictive modeling of atmospheric evolution, mapping of orbital trajectories, and mitigation of space weather hazards.

“I was motivated to pursue a tenure-track faculty position based on the positive feedback and recognition that I received during that time for my educational, scholarly, and service contributions,” Waldrop said.

In 2010 and 2011, she took a leave of absence from Illinois to work as a rotating advisor to the National Science Foundation, Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, and a visiting scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. From 2012-14, she served as chairwoman of the Scientific Advisory Committee for Arecibo Observatory.

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