The School of Informatics and Computing kicks off the 2013-2014 academic year with 11 new faculty members this academic year. With these additions, the School grows to 96 faculty members to accommodate increasing enrollments and growing interest in the School.
Associate Professor Funda Ergun received her B.S. in Computer Science from Bilkent University and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University. After completing her postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania, she joined Bell Labs as technical staff. She was a Schroeder Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University until she joined the Simon Fraser University faculty. Her research interests are randomized and streaming algorithms, as well as the theoretical aspects of high-speed networks, especially as they relate to quality of service.
Bernard Frischer joins the staff as a professor of informatics. Frishcher is a virtual archaeologist, classicist, and the author of many books, e-books, websites and articles on virtual heritage, classics, and the survival of antiquity. From 1976 to 2004, he taught classics at UCLA. Since 2004 he has been Professor of Art History and Classics at the University of Virginia, where he also served as director of the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory. Frischer earned his B.A. in Classics from Wesleyan University and his PhD from the University of Heidelberg.
Assistant Professor Sriraam Natarajan is interested in the field of artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on machine learning and its application to biomedical problems. He was previously an assistant professor at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine and completed a year post-doctoral research associate at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his Ph.D. from Oregon State University.
Filippo Radicchi joins the faculty as an assistant professor, focusing on the application of methods and tools of statistical physics to the study of complex systems and networks. Prior to joining the School, Radicchi was a senior researcher in the department of chemical engineering at the University Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. He has also served as a research specialist at the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy and Amaral Laboratory at Northwestern University. He earned his Ph.D. in physics at Jacobs University in Berlin.
Professor of Bioinformatics Cenk Sahinalp came to the School from Simon Fraser University, where he directed the lab for computational biology and served as a professor and Canada research chair in computational genomics. Prior to his stint at SFU, he worked at Case Western Reserve University, University of Warwick and Bell Labs. He has also taught at the University of Washington, the University of Pennsylvania and Sabanci and Bilkent Universities in Turkey. His research focuses on biomolecular sequence analysis, RNA structure and interaction prediction, topological properties of biomolecular networks and more recently QSAR analysis.
Associate Professor Jeremy Siek’s areas of research includes programming, program language design, type systems and computer optimization for high-level languages. Siek was previously an assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to his time at Colorado, Siek was a postdoctoral researcher at Rice University where he developed the idea of gradual typing.
Katie Siek, associate professor of informatics with a specialization in health informatics, joins the School from the University of Colorado Boulder where she led the Wellness Innovation and Interaction Lab. Her primary research interests are in human computer interaction, health informatics, and ubiquitous computing. Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation including a five-year NSF CAREER award. Prior to her appointment at Colorado, she completed her Ph.D. and M.S. at Indiana University Bloomington in computer science and her B.S. in computer science at Eckerd College.
Assistant Professor Sam Tobin-Hochstadt joins the School from Northeastern University, where he served as a research assistant professor. His work focuses on software evolution, dynamic languages, type systems, module systems, and metaprogramming. He popularized the phrase "scripts to programs." Tobin-Hochstadt earned his Ph.D. from Northeastern.
Assistant Professor Qin Zhang’s research interests include algorithms for massive data, data streams, algorithms on distributed data, data structures, external memory algorithms, database algorithms, and communication complexity. Zhang was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Center for Massive Data Algorithmics in the computer science department at Aarhus University in Denmark. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Two additional faculty – Simon DeDeo, who specializes in complex network and systems, and Norman Su, who focuses on human-computer interaction – will join the School in January 2014. The School also added two lecturers, Saul Blanco Rodriguez (lecturer) and Mitja Hmeljak (visiting lecturer), this fall.