After welcoming three new members of the faculty in the fall semester, the UCF Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering (CECE) has added two new researchers to its ranks.
Assistant Professor Xinyu Chen and Associate Professor Alessandro Fascetti join the department for the spring 2026 semester, bring a range of expertise from the digital realm. The hires are part of a larger hiring initiative that has brought more than 100 new faculty to the UCF College of Engineering and Computer Science over the past three years.
“We are very extremely pleased to welcome two more outstanding faculty members to CECE this spring,” says Kevin Mackie, the chair of the department. “It caps a highly successful recruiting year that saw five new faculty join the department, all of whom will significantly strengthen our research, teaching and partnership efforts.”
Chen joins UCF as a member of the newly launched Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IAI) after completing a postdoctoral appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His primary expertise is in the development and application of mathematical models that can be used to assess data for traffic, transportation and weather.
Fascetti focuses on the modeling and simulation of materials and resilient infrastructure, and was hired through the Knights Digital Twin initiative. He has substantial experience in computer vision and brings together physics-based modeling with immersive environments.
Learn more about the new faculty below:
Xinyu Chen
Assistant Professor
Xinyu Chen joins UCF as a member of the newly launched Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IAI). He earned his doctoral degree from the University of Montreal in Canada. Prior to joining UCF, he was a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research interests include machine learning, optimization, data science, time series analysis, transportation, urban studies and dynamical systems.
Alessandro Fascetti
Associate Professor
Fascetti is the director of the Digital Twin Infrastructure Science for Operations and Visualization in Engineering Resilience (DISCOVER) Lab and conducts research in the areas of digital twin modeling and computational simulation of civil engineering materials and structures. He received his doctoral, master’s and bachelor’s degrees from the Sapienza University of Rome. Fascetti has received nearly $5 million in research funding to date and has been sponsored by organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and NVIDIA. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles in international journals, conference proceedings and technical reports.
- Written by Marisa Ramiccio