Meet the new Khoury College faculty for 2022–23

As another academic year arrives, Khoury College is excited to announce more than two dozen faculty additions.

Among them are acclaimed teachers and researchers from across the globe, whose academic and industry work ranges from predictive analysis and machine learning ethics to sports analysis and animal–computer interaction. They represent a half-dozen campuses from Northeastern University’s global network, and their interdisciplinary appointments span four of Northeastern’s other colleges.

Mona Ali | Soheil Behnezhad | Rasika Bhalerao | Maitraye Das | Mahsa Derakhshan | Michael Everett | Mark Fontenot | Eric Gerber | Megan Hofmann | Chenyan Jia | Rébecca Kleinberger | Wallace Lages | Ada Lerner | Albert Lionelle | Blair MacIntyre | Chris Martens | Daniel Patterson | Ryan Rad | Sami Rollins | Herman Saksono | Ellen Spertus | Oscar Veliz | Wes Viles | Robin Walters | Hsiao-An (Justin) Wang | Shuo Zhang

Mona Ali
Associate teaching professor, joining fall 2022 in Vancouver

After completing a CS master’s and doctorate at the University of Manchester in the UK, Mona Ali spent two decades amassing experience in teaching, mentoring, training, and development. Along the way she developed research interests in text mining, natural language processing, databases, data analysis, web development, and user experience. Ali also engages in community service by promoting CS careers for young children and groups underrepresented in the field and helping them understand the field’s benefits.

Soheil Behnezhad
Assistant professor, joining Fall 2022

Soheil Behnezhad joins Khoury College from his postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Before that, he spent his doctoral days at the University of Maryland, where his thesis on algorithms for classical graph problems — supported by a Google fellowship — earned him the Charles A. Caramello Distinguished Dissertation Award. He has also spent time at Google Research, the Simons Institute, and the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

Behnezhad focuses on theoretical computer science, and his research spans massively parallel computation, graph sparsification, and large-scale algorithms, including streaming, sublinear, and dynamic algorithms. He wants to develop new algorithms that can quickly process large datasets; in his doctoral thesis, Behnezhad revisited several classical graph problems and proposed modern algorithms that would work against large inputs. He is also interested in developing a tool that would diagnose problems and tell computer scientists whether an algorithm could solve them quickly.

He begins his professorship at Khoury College with his wife Mahsa Derakhshan (see below), his partner in CS from their high school competition days through their move to the US and subsequent doctoral studies under the same advisor. That advisor, Mohammad Hajiaghayi, remarked that both were “rising stars in theoretical computer science.” Behnezhad and Derakhshan have collaborated on more than a dozen publications.

Rasika Bhalerao
Assistant teaching professor, joined August 2022 in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Oakland

Rasika Bhalerao, fresh off her doctoral studies at NYU Tandon, believes ethical technology is best achieved when the CS field reflects the populations for whom it designs technology. To that end, she’s particularly excited to work with Khoury College’s Align program, which serves CS master’s students from non-CS backgrounds. Her research delves into cybersecurity, ethics, social bias, and teaching these topics to intro CS students.

Outside of the classroom, Rasika is learning Spanish and Mandarin, loves to rock climb, and anonymously posts videos of her cat online.

Maitraye Das
Research fellow (joining fall 2023) and assistant professor (spring 2024) jointly appointed with CAMD

After five years at Northwestern University, Maitraye Das is jumping to Northeastern, doctorate in technology and social behavior in hand. Her choice of degree — along with her research at the nexus of human–computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work, and accessible computing — reflects her desire to leverage computing for social good.

Das works to reduce equity and accessibility gaps in education, employment, and creative work in order to help content-producing teams where some members have disabilities be more collaborative and flexible. Das employs a “human-centered, community based research approach” that blends qualitative studies like interviews and field work with the iterative design, development, and evaluation of new systems. Her recent projects include investigating the remote work practices of neurodivergent workers, building an audio-enhanced loom and pattern design tool for blind weaving artists, and developing accessibility-boosting auditory techniques for collaborative writers.

Das has earned several best paper awards, honorable mentions, and a diversity and inclusion award at an alphabet soup of prestigious HCI venues including ACM CHI and CSCW. She boasts a research award and multiple grants from Northwestern, plus an EECS Rising Star designation from MIT and the Daniel H. and Carolyn E. Ecroyd Fellowship. She has previously interned at Microsoft Research and lectured at United International University in Bangladesh, and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Washington.

Mahsa Derakhshan
Assistant professor joining Fall 2022

While her husband Soheil Behnezhad (above) works on maximizing algorithmic speed, Mahsa Derakhshan focuses on maximizing outcomes. She is interested in algorithmic design and analysis, especially under uncertainties such as having stochastic data, limiting access to information, or the presence of strategic behavior. She has designed algorithms to maximize revenue for online auctions, and to match advertisers and retailers with customers in online markets.

Derakhshan joins Khoury College after dual postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Michael Everett
Assistant professor jointly appointed with CoE, joining spring 2023

Michael Everett traversed the mechanical engineering path through his bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate, and postdoctoral research at MIT. He built a resume at the confluence of machine learning, robotics, and control theory, and marked the journey with ICRA, IROS, and IEEE best paper awards and finalist designations as though they were checkpoints. His team’s robots also caught the eye of NBC’s Today and the Boston Globe. He is currently a visiting faculty researcher on Google’s People + AI Research team.

Mark Fontenot
Teaching professor and assistant dean of student experience, joining fall 2022

For the last 17 years, Mark Fontenot made his mark in the CS department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and his resume speaks for itself. Ten-time Outstanding Faculty Member. The “M” Award, SMU’s highest commendation. The first-ever Provost’s Teaching Recognition Award. Assistant department chair and overseer of undergraduate programs. Teaching stints in Germany. Design lead for the engineering school’s “Introduction to Engineering Design” program. Now he’s traveling north, and bringing his interests in creativity, innovation, and leadership development with him.

Eric Gerber
Assistant teaching professor, joining fall 2022

A CS college isn’t the first place you’d look for a sports aficionado, but with strengths in predictive analysis and Bayesian data analysis, Eric Gerber has found a unique and sporty way to make an impact. While studying statistics at Purdue University, he crafted his dissertation around baseball analytics. Recognizing the lack of research emphasis on uncertainty quantification because teams’ internal models are private, Gerber created a model to predict seasonal plate appearance outcome vectors. In doing so, he accounted for quantified uncertainty, correlations between outcomes, and attempted to predict performance for players moving between the Japanese and American major leagues.

Gerber arrives at Northeastern from CSU Bakersfield, and strives to make statistics material interesting, engaging, and accessible for his students.

READ: How three Khoury College co-ops helped to rebuild an MLB team

Megan Hofmann
Postdoctoral research fellow (joining fall 2022) and assistant professor (fall 2023) jointly appointed with CoE

Megan Hofmann has woven accessibility into the fabric of her work. Literally: she is a leading researcher in the rising field of automatic machine knitting, in which software translates three-dimensional shapes into stitch-by-stitch instructions that a machine knits automatically. After researching machine knitting at Carnegie Mellon University, Hofmann developed and taught a graduate-level course on the topic at the University of Washington.

Hofmann’s research has been showcased at top HCI conferences, with her work on the application of digital fabrication in healthcare earning multiple awards at ACM-CHI and ASSETS. She has also received Siebel, NSF, and Center for Machine Learning and Health fellowships, not to mention an MIT EECS Rising Star designation and a visiting scholar position with MIT’s HCI Engineering Group.

Hofmann identifies as disabled, and uses her experience to inform her teaching and research. This has included serving as an accessibility chair for conferences, studying the ways disabled people interact with emerging technologies, and co-authoring a reflexive-analysis paper on how best to involve disabled people and their perspectives in accessibility research. As a newly minted Northeastern professor of CS and mechanical engineering, Hofmann is excited to teach courses on accessibility, infuse accessibility topics into all aspects of CS research and education, and work to improve accessibility for all members of the Khoury community.

Chenyan Jia
Assistant professor joining fall 2023, jointly appointed with CAMD

Technology has overhauled the practice and consumption of journalism to an extent unimaginable a few decades ago. Like any tech-based overhaul, it’s been a mixed bag, with the opportunities presented by new mediums and tools offset by the turbo-charged spread of false information.

Enter Chenyan Jia. After spending the 2022–23 academic year as a postdoctoral scholar in Stanford University’s Program on Democracy and the Internet, Jia will join Northeastern as an assistant professor in Khoury College and the School of Journalism. Jia’s research blends HCI and communication to examine how emerging technologies such as misinformation detection algorithms and automated journalism impact people’s political attitudes and news consumption. She has also studied the political bias of news coverage using natural language processing and has leveraged AI technologies to reduce bias in news reporting and promote democracy.

Jia’s research has appeared in mass communication journals and top-tier AI and HCI venues, and garnered her a Best Paper Award at AAAI 2021. She also received the Harrington Dissertation Fellowship and the Dallas Morning News Graduate Fellowship for Journalism Innovation.

Rébecca Kleinberger
Assistant professor joining fall 2022, jointly appointed with CAMD

Everywhere you look in Rébecca Kleinberger’s CS career, you find breadth. Kleinberger has breadth of field; she is a creative technologist and voice researcher whose work spans HCI, animal–computer interaction, robotics, virtual reality, music technology, wearable computing, machine learning, neurology, psychology, assistive technology, and vocal experiences design. Through it all, Kleinberger aspires to create more healthy and meaningful technologies with and for the voice.

Her work has been featured in a breadth of media outlets (The New York Times, The Boston Globe, FT Magazine, Engadget, 60 Minutes, TED), large-scale productions (at Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Symphony, the Maison Symphonique de Montréal, the Lucerne Festival, the Winspear Opera House), conferences (CHI, SIGGRAPH, UIST, NIME, TEI), and exhibits (at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Le Laboratoire in Paris, the Harvard Divinity School, the San Diego Zoo, and the Electromagnetic Field festival in the UK).

“I am excited to be a part of the community and learn from students and colleagues,” Kleinberger said. “I look forward to sharing my expertise in applied multidisciplinary research, from voice technology beyond words to assistive technology and animal–computer interaction!”

Wallace Lages
Assistant professor joining spring 2023, jointly appointed with CAMD

Wallace Lages’ academic sweet spot blends CS, game design, engineering, art, and psychology. He researches AR and VR user experience in digital games, computer graphics and haptics. He has also exhibited his interactive artwork on four continents.

Lages will join Khoury College from Virginia Tech’s School of Visual Arts, where he directed the Reality Design Studio. He has also taught at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil — where he helped develop a degree in animated cinema and digital arts — and co-founded the game studio Ilusis Interactive Graphics. An HCI devotee who believes computers are bicycles for the mind, Lages enjoys mountain biking, camping, hiking, and building things.

Ada Lerner
Khoury Research Fellow (joined July 2022) and assistant professor (fall 2023)

Over five years as a professor at Wellesley College and a doctoral stint at the University of Washington, Ada Lerner honed a research interest in security and privacy. They focus specifically on privacy law, communities’ privacy perceptions and norms, and the security and privacy needs of marginalized or vulnerable people. Their projects often call for varied research methods, and blend CS with law, international relations, and feminist and queer theories. Lerner’s current work includes NSF-funded survey and design work on the security and privacy needs of transgender people.

Albert Lionelle
Associate teaching professor and director of Align Online, joining fall 2022

Over several stints at Colorado State University, Albert Lionelle first built his own CS knowledge base, then a researcher’s resume, and finally the bona fides of a consummate educator. After earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the university, he transitioned through a palette of positions within the CS department. With each course, minor, and major, he designed and redesigned curricula to open the field’s doors to women and other underrepresented groups, increasing their enrollment and retention at each stage. This included key roles in redesigning CSU’s CS major and bringing the program online. Outside of CSU, Lionelle wore a few other hats: co-owner of US Soil, co-owner of Real Food and Health magazine, and innovative principal of Horizons Exploratory Academy in Salida, Colorado.

Lionelle’s PhD is in CS education, and his research seeks to improve diversity and inclusion through curriculum design, partly by developing equitable, scalable grading practices. He co-founded CSedU, a CS education at CSU research group whose novel research is supported by Northeastern’s Center for Inclusive Computing. At Khoury College, he will play a crucial role in the Align master’s program, which attracts a diverse cross-section of learners by providing master’s CS instruction for students without CS backgrounds.

Blair MacIntyre
Professor joining fall 2022, jointly appointed with CAMD

Over the past three decades, Blair MacIntyre has designed, programmed, and leveraged AR and VR tools and experiences for gaming, entertainment, educational, industrial, and military uses. He has helped bring AR and extended reality technology to the web, first by starting the open-source Argon project and then by working as a principal research scientist at Mozilla. MacIntyre has published more than 100 academic papers and currently researches the use of distributed, social mixed reality to support meetings and teaching.

Before joining Khoury College, MacIntyre spent more than 20 years teaching a smorgasbord of computing courses at Georgia Tech, from game design to privacy policy to computer graphics. He also co-designed the school’s computation media and threaded CS programs, ran an experimental game studio, and directed the Augmented Environments Lab’s design and implementation of mixed- and augmented-reality environments. MacIntyre will initially be on leave at JPMorgan Chase, where he is starting an AR/VR/internet of things research group.

Chris Martens
Associate professor joining fall 2022, jointly appointed with CAMD

For Chris Martens, CS is about crafting tools for creative expression and liberation. Supported at different times by the Air Force, the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, and the NSF CAREER Award, Chris’s research bridges programming languages, HCI, game design, and procedural content generation, with the goal of enabling expressive and playful interactions with software. Chris directs the Principles of Expressive Machines (POEM) Lab, founded at their previous professorship at NC State.

READ: Chris Martens wants to make it easier to create video games

Daniel Patterson
Assistant teaching professor, joining fall 2022

Daniel’s Patterson’s journey is a Khoury College one through and through. Just weeks after defending his dissertation on the semantics of language interoperability, he’s moving out from under professor Amal Ahmed to join her in Khoury College’s professor ranks. He does so with a graduate teaching award in hand, and experience designing and teaching an upper-level elective. Before coming to Khoury College, Patterson started a small software cooperative in Brooklyn.

Patterson acknowledges the difficulties in replacing older programs with ones based on newer languages. With his research, he wants to ease that process by helping programmers reason about programs that involve multiple interacting languages. “Studying languages,” he says, “is as much about the ways that programmers think as it is about principled models of computation.”

Ryan Rad
Assistant teaching professor, joined summer 2022 in Vancouver

Ryan Rad’s decade plus of CS experience spans both academia and industry. He has engineered for industry giants HP and Microsoft. He has taught at five different institutions of higher learning across Canada, most recently the University of British Columbia. He has founded two companies: a first-of-its-kind platform that provided automated analysis and deep insight on language skills for the TOEFL exam (TOEFLx), and a platform that connects employers with tech talent (Excelira).

He has published more than 20 papers, garnered more than 500 citations, and spoken and served as a technical committee member for several top-tier CS journals and conferences. His projects deliver cutting-edge AI, machine learning, data analytics, and computer vision solutions in areas such as healthcare and green technology. In the last few years, he has been the brains behind the world’s first waste management platform (Oscar by Intuitive AI) to empower a zero waste world.

Sami Rollins
Teaching professor and director of computer programs in Arlington, Virginia; joined August 2022

Apart from her interests in mobile and distributed computing, Sami Rollins’ dual drives are to broaden computing participation and to expand computing education. During her 16 years at the University of San Francisco, she tackled both goals by working with the NSF to award scholarships to USF’s computing students and develop their confidence and computing identities through community building. Rollins also served as an NSF program director, and co-directed a project that boosted energy efficiency in residential buildings.

“I am very excited to help start a new campus in Arlington, and I am especially excited to serve a diverse, domestic population of Align students,” Rollins said. “I look forward to running flat paths (compared to hilly San Francisco), free museums, and all of the delicious food DC has to offer.”

Herman Saksono
Assistant professor joining fall 2022, jointly appointed with Bouvé

For Herman Saksono, this interdisciplinary appointment represents a homecoming. Saksono spent the bulk of the 2010s at Khoury College working first on a Fulbright-funded master’s degree, then on a doctorate. He has spent the last two years as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard’s Center for Research on Computation and Society, and has also received two honorable mentions for his CHI papers.

Saksono’s research focuses on the confluence of HCI, personal health informatics, and digital health equity, and promotes positive health behavior through individual and collective efforts. He examines how health data can support physical activity within families and neighborhoods, and partners with communities to design, build, and evaluate innovative, human-centered health technologies. In particular, he examines how to support storytelling, gamification, visualization, and data reflection in health technologies. Ultimately, Saksono is interested in investigating how computational tools can promote health equity and social justice.

Ellen Spertus
Teaching professor, joining fall 2022 in Oakland

Unlike most of the others on this list, Ellen Spertus’ move to Northeastern won’t require a physical move. That’s because after two decades teaching, chairing the math and CS department, and directing the interdisciplinary CS graduate program at Mills College, she’s staying local to teach computing fundamentals as the Oakland, California campus joins Northeastern’s global network.

“While I am sad that Mills had to cease being an independent college, I am delighted to be part of a thriving computing college with hundreds of colleagues, thousands of students, and a commitment to teaching excellence, inclusivity, and experiential learning,” Spertus said.

Fitting for someone who spent the bulk of her career at a Hispanic-serving women’s college, Spertus is passionate about increasing CS diversity and education access. She has served on the ACM Council on Women in Computing, and she also founded and organized the annual Tech Intersections: Women of Color in Computing conference. She spent 11 years at Google, where she worked on App Inventor (which enables computing novices to create mobile apps) and the first Hour of Code tutorial (a one-hour coding-and-CS intro that has since grown into a global assortment of different community efforts). Spertus also crafted the first software that categorized personal email based on content, and was named “Sexiest Geek Alive” in a 2001 parody pageant that emphasized knowledge of technology, science fiction, and other “nerd” topics.

Oscar Veliz
Assistant teaching professor, joining fall 2022 in Seattle

Oscar Veliz joins Khoury College from a postdoctoral teaching fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University. Veliz has always been a teacher, even during an industry journey that took him through Hewlett-Packard, ExxonMobil, and Microsoft, where he provided CS instruction in high schools through the Microsoft Philanthropies program. He crafts YouTube videos about numerical analysis which have garnered more than 7,500 subscribers and 1.5 million views. In addition to numerical analysis, Veliz is interested in AI, game theory, and CS pedagogy. During his doctoral studies at the University of Texas at El Paso, he received the Google-CAHSI Dissertation Award.

Wes Viles
Assistant teaching professor, joining fall 2022 in Portland, Maine

For Wes Viles, the move to Northeastern’s Roux Institute was a short eastward hop from the Portland-based University of Southern Maine. He’ll teach courses in the core data science and Align CS programs, building on his experience developing coursework to introduce mathematics and statistical methodology to aspiring data scientists. In addition to his time in Portland, Viles has taught at Mt. Holyoke College, Boston University, and Colby College.

Viles’ research aims to develop network analysis theory and methods from their statistical foundations, then apply them to natural systems. He studies the statistical associations among entities in complex systems as a way to analyze the systems holistically. In recent years, he has developed network-based predictors for use in neuroscience and epidemiology.

Robin Walters
Assistant professor, joined August 2022

From his doctoral studies through his Experimental AI postdoctoral research fellowship at Khoury College, Robin Walters has aimed to understand the role of symmetry in deep learning. He is working to apply this understanding of symmetry to climate change, transportation, and similarly complex areas. He is the principal investigator of a recent million-dollar NSF grant for this very purpose. Walters also previously worked as a technical director at Pixar Animation Studios.

Hsiao-An (Justin) Wang
Assistant teaching professor, joining fall 2022

In Hsiao-An (Justin) Wang, Khoury College is getting a cybersecurity instructor whose research develops accessible, exciting pedagogy for cybersecurity awareness inside and outside the tech field. Wang is a certified ethical hacker who seeks offensive security experiences through exercises, capture the flag, and vulnerable box threat hunting. He has also organized several cybersecurity training workshops, built a mobile cybersecurity range with a local nonprofit, and served as lead instructor for the NSA-sponsored GenCyber Camp.

READ: Northeastern’s cybersecurity teams win two trophies in two months

Shuo Zhang
Assistant professor joining fall 2022, jointly appointed with CSSH

Because online job searching is so ubiquitous, it’s extremely important the algorithms that govern it are fair. Enter Shuo Zhang, who boasts degrees in economics, law, and statistics/data science and has centered her research on equality and disparity in online job search spaces. Her research encompasses workers’ job search behaviors, employers’ recruitment decisions, and the role of platforms in online job matching. In particular, Zhang has focused on gender equality in the online job market, including gender requests in job ads, the matching efficiency of job recommendation algorithms, and gender discrimination in job recommendations on online platforms.

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