Dr. Shahab Tayeb is a firm believer in wedding research with the University’s mission by innovating at a curricular level. He hopes to achieve this by developing new courses on Cloud, cyber security and the Internet of things design.

An assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Lyles College of Engineering, Tayeb joined Fresno State in fall 2018 and has made an impact on the campus community in his first year.

Tayeb believes that supporting K-12 students is key to a brighter future, and he is involved in multiple projects training K-12 educators. He recently developed and delivered a project on an embedded fingerprint sensor for elementary and middle schoolers.

He received a United States Congressional Commendation for his STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) mentorship. He also regularly attends microteaching and pedagogical focus groups to improve his delivery of technically dense topics and to change lives through his teaching. He was selected as one of the 2019 ELEVATE Fellows at the University of Pennsylvania.

In ECE 71, Engineering Computations, and ECE 85, Digital Logic Design, Tayeb has integrated diverse and effective technologies into his pedagogical and content knowledge. His techniques address learning gaps, enhance student learning and contextualize learning.

“Our future legacy is as much in the lives we influence as educators as in our contributions to the advancement of science,” Tayeb said. “Academia provides an opportunity to combine research and teaching in a way not possible in any other setting: teaching classes, getting students engaged in research, and, ultimately, feeding some aspects of that research back into the classroom.”

Tayeb's courses will pave the path for Fresno State graduates to be employed by the local and regional industry with the goal of building the infrastructure of a smarter planet. With support from the local telecommunications industry, he is inaugurating the Bulldog Hackathon, in which ECE students will work in teams to design, build and test their software and hardware projects.

Leveraging his experience from working in the embedded-networking and cybersecurity industry since 2010, Tayeb strives to tame the emerging generation of smart devices through his research. He recently received funding from the Fresno State Transportation Institute to study the security of connected and autonomous vehicles. Tayeb and his collaborators, from the Lyles College of Engineering and the College of Science and Mathematics, have established the Central California Center for Cybersecurity (C-Quartic) to carry out research in the field of embedded cybersecurity.

Such research includes using deep learning architectures to provide new capabilities for mitigating zero-day security threats and emerging attack vectors, in addition to developing real-time intrusion-detection techniques.

Tayeb has published peer-reviewed articles on topics including: securing smart cities by design, designing a Science DMZ to facilitate the use of dedicated network bandwidth for research big-data traffic, configuring privacy-preserving cloudlets for critical infrastructures, developing secure network frameworks for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-Cloud communications, and covering other topics related to networking and cybersecurity, particularly in the contexts of the Internet of things and cyber-physical systems.

Some of his work has received international awards, including a best paper, and was highlighted by funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation.