Pa. — Penn State Great Valley’s engineering division welcomed two new faculty members for the fall 2026 semester
Trisha Campanaro, assistant professor of engineering management
Trisha Campanaro is teaching courses this fall on technical project management and on the application of statistics in quality and continuous improvement in engineering. She holds a doctoral degree in engineering systems from Penn State Harrisburg and wrote her dissertation on sound perception and noise reduction in air blowers using computational fluid dynamics and machine learning.
Campanaro also holds a master’s degree in engineering management from Rowan University, where she focused on project management, construction management and engineering analytics.
She previously served as an adjunct professor in mechanical engineering and as a graduate teaching assistant at Penn State Harrisburg, where she received a seed grant for advanced engineering systems research. She led a student research team, sponsored by an industry partner, focused on product improvement through experimental design and vibration analysis.
Campanaro brings to her new faculty role more than five years of experience bridging academic research, industry leadership and pedagogical innovation. She specializes in delivering practice-oriented instruction for working professionals using lean methodology and decision analytics frameworks.
“I’m thrilled to join Penn State Great Valley’s engineering division and collaborate with talented faculty and students on research and industry-focused projects,” Campanaro said. “I’m especially excited to bring research and industry perspectives into the classroom and to explore innovative approaches to engineering education. My goal is to create engaging, practice-oriented learning experiences that prepare students for real-world challenges while continually improving how we teach and learn engineering.”
Joseph Gallego, assistant professor of artificial intelligence
Joseph Gallego is teaching courses this fall on machine learning systems and foundations of predictive analytics. He previously taught advanced programming, algorithms, and data science at Drexel University. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the National University of Colombia in systems and computing engineering with a research focus on machine learning.
Gallego’s research background includes work with Trillium Technologies’ Frontier Development Lab, a public-private partnership supported by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). As a faculty member, he guided teams in developing machine learning architectures to forecast solar wind and estimate forest biomass using tomographic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images.
An active researcher, Gallego has published more than 40 articles on topics including computer vision, anomaly detection, quantum machine learning, and self-supervised learning. Notably, he co-authored a research project that earned a 2023 Best Paper Award at a workshop that was part of NeurIPS, the conference on neural information processing systems.
In addition to his academic credentials, Gallego brings over a decade of industry experience to his faculty position. As manager of software engineering and machine learning at Munkys Group, he led engineering teams in developing scalable applications, machine learning pipelines and models grounded in lean practices and statistical development.
“I am thrilled to join the engineering division at Penn State Great Valley,” Gallego said. “My background bridging academia and industry aligns seamlessly with Great Valley’s ecosystem, and I look forward to strengthening our students’ AI capabilities while building impactful research and industry partnerships.”
Last Updated September 10, 2026
