It has been a banner year for interviewing and hiring new faculty at Khoury College. While some joined the college in May 2021, many more are coming on board in time for the fall semester and new academic year. A few more are slated to join in early 2022. All highly competitive candidates, with notable experience in research, teaching, and industry, these 34 new professors will enrich academic life across the network.

Jump to: Michal Aibin  | Silvio Amir | David Bau | Enrico Bertini | Adeel Bhutta | Philip Bogden | Gary Cantrell | Divya Chaudhary | Sophine Clachar | Lino Coria Mendoza  | Katie Creel  | Bob De Schutter | Seyede Fatemeh Ghoreishi | Sina Fazelpour | Lama Hamandi | Steven Holtzen | Alan Jamieson  | Lindsay Jamieson  | Huaizu Jiang  | Jeongkyu Lee  | Meica Magnani  | Sakib Miazi  | Varun Mishra  | Alvaro Monge | Ab Mosca | Jonathan Mwaura | Jose Perea  | Vance Ricks | Michael Running Wolf  | Aarti Sathyanarayana | Saiph Savage  | Logan Schmidt  | Sarita Singh  | Cheng Tan  | Melanie Tory | Mohammadhossein Toutiaee | Rai Winslow

Michal Aibin
Michal Aibin is an associate professor of computer science at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University’s Vancouver campus. Outside of his role at Northeastern, he is also a research faculty member at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. His research interests include the optimization of various processes using adaptive approaches, such as machine learning. His recent focus is on cognitive networking, particularly data analytics, machine learning, and deep learning concepts applied to optical networks to enable cognitive network data analysis.

Aibin began his doctoral studies at the Department of Systems and Computer Networks at the Wroclaw University of Technology in 2012, where he was twice awarded the dean’s award and a scholarship to the best doctoral students. He received his doctoral degree in June 2017 by defending his thesis: “Dynamic Routing Algorithms for Cloud-Ready Elastic Optical Networks.” He currently upholds his first academic position in the Department of Computing at the British Columbia University of Technology in Vancouver, Canada, where he was awarded the Employee Excellence Award in the applied research category. He joined Northeastern University in 2020 as a part-time associate professor.

Silvio Amir
Silvio Amir is an assistant professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. His research develops natural language processing, machine learning, and information retrieval methods for personal and user-generated text, such as social media and clinical notes from electronic health records. Amir is primarily interested in methods for tasks involving subjective, personalized, or user-level inferences (e.g. opinion mining and digital phenotyping). In particular, his work aims to improve the reliability, interpretability, and fairness of predictive models and analytics derived from personal and user-generated data. His research is part of ongoing efforts to develop human-centered AI (i.e. to empower rather than replace humans) and AI for social good (i.e. to tackle meaningful social, societal, and humanitarian challenges). To achieve these goals, he often collaborates with domain experts in multidisciplinary projects to address real-world problems in the social sciences, medicine, and epidemiology.

Amir earned his doctorate from the University of Lisbon, and conducted part of his doctoral research as a visiting researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and at Northeastern University in Boston. He then moved to John Hopkins University, where he completed his postdoctoral research in the Center for Language and Speech Processing and served as a lecturer at the Whiting School of Engineering.

David Bau
David Bau will be an assistant professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences in January 2022. Bau is currently completing his doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. He has pioneered methods for the dissection, visualization, and interactive manipulation of deep networks in computer vision. Bau is the creator of Network Dissection and GAN Paint, which enables individuals to directly edit state-of-the-art neural networks internally.

Before researching at MIT, he was an engineer at Google, where he built image search ranking algorithms, Hangouts, and the Pencil Code educational programming system. Before this, he was the creator of the Apache XMLbeans compiler and core technologies for the .NET framework and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Bau is the coauthor of Numerical Linear Algebra, has published numerous papers, and holds patents. He received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Harvard College and his graduate degree in computer science from Cornell University.

Enrico Bertini
Enrico Bertini will be an associate professor at Northeastern University in 2022, holding a joint appointment with the College of Arts, Media, and Design and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Bertini works on data visualization interfaces to help people make sense of the world through data. In recent years, his work has focused on the use of visual interfaces to explore, validate, and understand machine learning models and systems. His research also aims to advance the theoretical and empirical understanding of how people extract information and meaning from visual representations.

In 2006, Bertini earned a doctorate in computer engineering from the University of Rome La Sapienza, in his hometown of Rome. Between 2006-2012, he was a research scientist at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland and at the University of Konstanz, Germany. In 2012, he joined the NYU School of Engineering as an assistant professor; he was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 2018. Bertini is the co-host of Data Stories, a popular podcast series that discusses the role of data in everyday life.

Adeel A. Bhutta
Adeel A. Bhutta is an associate teaching professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. His primary areas of research are image processing and computer vision, and he is currently working on selective subtraction, dynamic scene modeling, object detection, and deep learning.

Before joining Northeastern, Bhutta was a senior lecturer of computer science in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington. In this role, he proposed, developed, and taught many fundamental and advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in different areas like programming, mobile app development, image processing, and software engineering. Before this, he was the coordinator and lecturer of computer technology (now known as information technology) at Kent State University at Stark. There he developed the computer technology (COMT) program from the ground up and led it as it became the fastest-growing program on campus. Bhutta also taught a number of computer science and electrical and computer engineering courses at the University of Central Florida and Valencia College.

Bhutta’s industry experience includes work on the optimization of video compression algorithms (H263) for TriMedia processors and the development of application software for Voice over IP (VoIP) systems. He received his doctorate in computer engineering, a graduate degree in computer science, and a graduate degree in computer engineering from the University of Central Florida. Bhutta has regularly served on many departmental/educational committees along with program committees of several international conferences and journals, and he has received several fellowships, scholarships, and awards. Earlier this year (2021), he was awarded James Mumford Excellence in Extraordinary Teaching Award from Faculty Academy on Excellence in Teaching at IU. In 2019, he was awarded Indiana University’s prestigious Trustees Teaching Award, and in 2017 he was awarded SICE’s Champion of Inclusion Award.

Philip Bogden
Philip Bogden is an associate teaching professor at the Roux Institute at Northeastern University. Before joining Khoury College, he taught data visualization and machine learning in the graduate programs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He received his doctorate from the University of California, San Diego, as well as his undergraduate degree from Harvard College.

Bogden has provided custom data analytics and visualizations for a range of clients, including companies in the oil and gas industry and the financial services sector. He was previously the CEO of a non-profit organization that provided real-time environmental data as a public service, and he spent two years helping to develop and implement open data policy and cyber-infrastructure for the National Science Foundation. Before entering the private sector, he was part of the teaching faculty at Yale University and the University of Connecticut.

Gary Cantrell
Gary Cantrell is an associate teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. His research interests include digital forensics, digital triage, digital forensics education, steganography, and computer security.

A native of Mississippi, Cantrell spent many years moving around the state for his two different careers. He spent four years working for the US government as a computer scientist, including working for the Navy, the Army, and a few months for the Air Force. The rest of his career was spent in computer science and digital forensics education, including four years spent training law enforcement with the National Forensic Training Center at Mississippi State University.

After receiving his doctorate in computer science from Dixie State University, Cantrell proceeded to work there as a tenure track professor. During this time, he was instrumental in establishing the DSU Computer Crime Institute, where he was consulted on digital forensics exams and trained law enforcement as the developer and principal faculty for digital forensics academic programs. After spending two years as a tenured professor at DSU Cantrell moved to Southern Utah University where he served as a tenure track faculty member for the Computer Science and Information Systems Department.

Divya Chaudhary
Divya Chaudhary is an assistant teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University’s Seattle campus. Her research interests include cloud computing, load scheduling and machine learning applications.

Chaudhary has over seven years of experience working in academia. She has conducted research in load scheduling and cloud computing. She taught undergraduate courses as an assistant professor and teaching assistant at Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology (NSUT) in New Delhi, India for five years. She has also taught undergraduate courses in various capacities at several governmental departments of Delhi, India. For over two years, she taught high school students the basics of computers and programming languages.

Chaudhary received her doctorate in computer engineering from the University of Delhi in India. Her work aims to optimize and schedule load in the cloud to achieve reduced computational costs. Over the years, she has published multiple research papers in journals and conferences. She has worked on many research projects with her undergraduate students. During her graduate program, she was awarded a gold medal for her exemplary performance by the university.

Sophine Clachar
Sophine Clachar is an assistant teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, focusing on online courses.

Before joining Northeastern, Clachar worked in the FinTech field and later transitioned to the non-profit sector to work on open data initiatives. She also participated in various government-funded research projects to improve aviation safety that resulted in several publications and patents. Upon returning to academia, she developed and taught various data science and machine learning courses. Clachar received her doctorate in scientific computing from the University of North Dakota.

Lino Coria Mendoza
Lino Coria Mendoza is an associate teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University’s Vancouver campus. His research interests are image processing and computer vision applications.

Coria Mendoza has over 15 years of experience working in both industry and academia. He has conducted research in the fields of image processing and computer vision. For over six years, he was a professor at Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO) in Mexico. Coria Mendoza has also taught several courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels at the University of British Columbia in Canada, Langara College in Canada, and the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV) in Guadalajara, Mexico. For almost a decade, Coria Mendoza was an engineer at several Vancouver startups where he developed computer vision algorithms and machine learning models for a variety of applications, including online video and metadata optimization, custom footwear design, and agricultural technology.

He received his bachelor’s in electronics engineering from Instituto Tecnológico de Morelia in Mexico. He completed his master’s degree in electrical engineering from McMaster University in Canada with a scholarship from the Mexican Science and Technology Council. Coria Mendoza also received funding from the Mexican Science and Technology Council to complete his doctorate from the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Kathleen (Katie) Creel
Dr. Katie Creel is an assistant professor of philosophy and computer science at Northeastern University, holding joint appointments in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Her research explores the moral, political, and epistemic implications of machine learning as it is used in automated decision-making and in science.

Before joining Northeastern, Creel was the Embedded EthiCS fellow in the Center for Ethics in Society and the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. In this role, she worked with the Stanford Computer Science department to embed ethics in the core curriculum. Creel worked as a software engineer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and subsequently pursued her doctorate in history and philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh. She holds a master’s in philosophy from Simon Fraser University, and a bachelor’s in computer science and philosophy from Williams College.

Bob De Schutter
Bob De Schutter is an associate professor at Northeastern University, holding joint appointments with the College of Arts, Media, and Design and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. His creative, research, and teaching interests include game design, the older audience of digital games, and the use of games for non-entertainment purposes.

De Schutter is the owner of the award-winning game company, Lifelong Games LLC. His research on gerontoludic design, gameful instruction, and gaminiscing has been published in leading publications of several fields, and he has been credited with the design of a wide range of indie, educational and therapeutic games. His work has received several awards and recognition.

De Schutter has served as an independent consultant, public speaker, developer, and entrepreneur. He is a lifetime member of the International Game Developers Association and IndieCade, and has founded and chaired the Gerontoludic Society as well as the Flemish chapter of the Digital Games Research Association. Before joining Northeastern University, De Schutter was the C. Michael Armstrong Professor of Applied Game Design at Miami University in Ohio where he directed Miami University’s Engaging Technology Lab.

Seyede Fatemeh Ghoreishi
Seyede Fatemeh Ghoreishi is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE) at Northeastern University. She holds a joint appointment with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Her research interests include design under uncertainty, machine learning, and Bayesian statistics.

Ghoreishi received both her master’s and doctorate in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University in 2016 and 2019 respectively. She holds a minor in Applied Statistics from Texas A&M University. In 2014, she also received her master’s in biomedical engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology. Earlier, Ghoreishi completed her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Tehran in 2012.

Before joining Northeastern, Ghoreishi was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) at the University of Maryland for two years. She is the recipient of several awards, including Rising Stars in Computational and Data Sciences at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin in 2019 and Rising Stars in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 2020.

Sina Fazelpour
Sina Fazelpour is an assistant professor of philosophy and computer science at Northeastern University, holding a joint appointment with the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He is also a fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Data Policy.

Before joining Northeastern, Fazelpour was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Philosophy, with secondary affiliation with the machine learning department.

Fazelpour received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of British Columbia. During his studies, he was a graduate research fellow at The W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics, an instructor in the cognitive systems program, and a UBC Public Scholar. Before pursuing his doctorate, he received his undergraduate degree in electrical and biomedical engineering from McMaster University and his graduate degree in medical biophysics from the University of Toronto.

Beyond academics, Fazelpour enjoys soccer, boxing, and literature. Some of his translations and poems have appeared in The Antigonish Review, Frogpond, and Haiku 21: an anthology of contemporary English-language haiku.

Lama Hamandi
Lama Hamandi is an associate teaching professor at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Her research interests include parallel processing, machine learning, and natural language processing. 

Hamandi received her graduate degree and doctorate from Ohio State University with a major in computer engineering, and minors in computer science, and communication. She received her undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the American University of Beirut.  

Before joining Northeastern University, Hamandi was a senior lecturer at the American University of Beirut, and before this, she was the chairperson of the computer science department at the Business and Computer University College in Beirut. Hamandi taught various courses in electrical and computer engineering, and computer science mainly in the areas of electric circuits and electronics, digital systems design and computer organization, and programming and data structures. She supervised several capstone projects and graduate students in various areas such as machine learning and assistive technologies. 

Steven Holtzen
Steven Holtzen is an assistant professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. His research focuses on designing systems for probabilistic modeling and reasoning and lies at the intersection between artificial intelligence, machine learning, and programming languages.

Holtzen received his doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles co-advised by Guy Van den Broeck and Todd Millstein. His work has been recognized by an ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award.

Alan Jamieson
Alan Jamieson is a teaching professor at the Roux Institute at Northeastern University. His research interests include broadening participation in computer science, K-12 computational thinking and data science education integration, and combinatorial graph theory. Jamieson has spent his career introducing computer science to students with varying backgrounds and experiences with technology – including cool and innovative pedagogical techniques whenever he can.

Before joining Northeastern, Jamieson was a professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland for 14 years, which included serving as chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. He received his doctoral degree in computer science from Clemson University. He is a recipient of the National Center for Women and Information Technology’s Undergraduate Research Mentorship Award, and he has been recognized for his service as a reviewer of the Aspirations in Computing Awards. In 2019, he was selected as a member of Amazon’s inaugural AWS Educate Cloud Ambassador Program for his work integrating cloud computing concepts into the liberal arts classroom. In his free time, Jamieson is a world-class consumer of coffee and donuts.

Lindsay Jamieson
Lindsay Jamieson is a teaching professor at the Roux Institute at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on recruiting and retaining students from diverse backgrounds with a range of experiences in technology. Her work includes developing materials for K-12 teachers and examining best practices to prepare pre-service teachers to include computational thinking in their classrooms.

Before joining Northeastern, she was a professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland for 14 years. In addition to her academic role, she has served in roles with the Association for Computing Machinery – Women (ACM-W), including co-chair for ACM-W North America’s Student Chapters committee. She also volunteers with the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), the Girl Scouts, and local K-12 schools. Jamieson received her doctoral degree from Clemson University after spending time in quality assurance and development industry roles. Jamieson is a proponent of tea, books, and chocolate—preferably all together.

Huaizu Jiang
Huaizu Jiang is an assistant professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He has broad research interests in computer vision, computational photography, natural language processing, and machine learning. His long-term research aims to teach machines to develop visual intelligence in a manner analogous to humans. In the short term, Jiang’s research goal is to create smart visual perception tools to improve people’s life experiences of using cameras.

Prior to joining Northeastern University, Jiang spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology and a visiting researcher at NVIDIA. He received his doctorate from the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His work, SuperSloMo, was recognized as one of the ten coolest papers from CVPR 2018. Jiang is a recipient of the Adobe Fellowship and NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship.

Jeongkyu Lee
Jeongkyu Lee is a teaching professor at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Lee primarily focuses on multimedia database management systems and analytics. His research interests include graph-based multimedia data modeling, indexing structure, query processing, content/semantic-based multimedia retrieval, and summary. His work utilizes various techniques, such as multimedia data mining, video processing, multimedia ontology, medical imaging/video, and natural user interface.

In 2006, he received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Texas at Arlington advised by Dr. JungHwan Oh. Before pursuing his doctorate, he worked as a database administrator for seven years with companies including Boram Bank, Hana Bank, and IBM Korea. Lee received his graduate degree in computer science from Sogang University and his undergraduate degree in mathematic education from Sungkyunkwan University, both in South Korea.

Meica Danielle Magnani
Meica Magnani is an assistant teaching professor at Northeastern University, holding a joint appointment with the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Her main line of research spans the areas of moral, social and political, and feminist philosophy. Magnani is concerned with the relationship between rational agency, autonomy, and the social and technological structures that organize human activity. In her work, she uses Kantian practical philosophy, informed by feminist, political, and social thought, to examine moral and political problems, such as social injustice and oppression, that arise from our embedded nature.

Before joining Northeastern, Magnani was a postdoctoral fellow in the philosophy department at Harvard University, where she worked with Embedded EthiCS @ Harvard–a team of philosophers and computer scientists who integrate ethical reasoning into computer science curriculum. She received her doctorate in philosophy from Stanford University in 2019.

Sakib Miazi
Sakib Miazi is an assistant teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston. As a usable privacy and security researcher, his research focuses on evaluating and developing privacy-preserving tools and frameworks for ubiquitous technologies. Miazi uses mixed methods to understand how users take their privacy decisions in pervasive settings to design and create privacy-preserving frameworks. He is also interested in cybersecurity education research to make cybersecurity education accessible and usable to those outside of the tech field.

Since 2014, Miazi has been in higher education, teaching several undergraduate and graduate-level computing courses both in Bangladesh and the U.S. Before joining Northeastern, he was a visiting assistant professor at Davidson College.

Miazi grew up in the suburbs of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. In 2013, he received his bachelor’s in computer science from the University of Dhaka. Subsequently, he attended the University of North Carolina, Charlotte and earned his doctorate in computing and information systems in 2020. While being a doctoral student he was awarded the outstanding teaching assistant award from the College of Computing and Informatics. He loves to travel and try different foods.

Varun Mishra
Varun Mishra will be an assistant professor at Northeastern University from January 2022, holding a joint appointment with the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. His research focuses on leveraging ubiquitous technologies like smartphones and wearables to enable effective digital health interventions for mental and behavioral health outcomes. His research is in the broad field of Ubiquitous Computing and lies at the intersection of mobile/wearable sensing, human-centered computing, data science, and behavioral science. Varun’s work is highly interdisciplinary, and he regularly collaborates with clinicians, psychologists, engineers, and other computer scientists to design, build, and deploy the tools and systems needed for their collective research goals.

Varun is currently a doctoral candidate (will graduate in summer 2021) in the computer science department at Dartmouth College. After graduating in the summer of 2021, he will work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health (CTBH) in the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.

Alvaro Monge
Alvaro Monge is a visiting professor and the Director of Computer Science in California at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Monge is joining Khoury College while on leave from California State University at Long Beach, where he is a professor.

Monge is passionate about supporting students in their education and has worked on projects with support from the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), Google, and the U.S. Department of Education, to increase the retention and graduation rates of female and Latinx students in computing majors. In 2018, Monge participated in Google’s Faculty in Residence program that empowers faculty to improve the preparation of underrepresented students for internships and jobs at tech companies. Before this, he spent three years in a team that created the EngageCSEdu living collection of instructional materials that applies research-based engagement practices. EngageCSEdu is now a special project of the ACM Education Board. Most recently, he served as program co-chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Technical Symposium for two years, from 2020-2021.

Monge earned his doctorate in computer science from the University of California at San Diego and his undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of California at Riverside. He has worked on applied research projects to improve web content for people with low vision and to assist marine biologists in studying juvenile white sharks.

Ab Mosca
Ab Mosca (they/them) will join the Khoury College of Computer Sciences as an assistant teaching professor in Fall 2021. Mosca received their doctorate in computer science from Tufts University in 2021, where they were a member of the Visual Analytics Lab at Tufts (VALT). Their research area is visualization, with a specific focus on leveraging visualization as a medium of communication to promote data-driven decision-making by society at large. Mosca has interned with the National Renewable Energy Lab, and In-Q-Tel. Before graduate school, they worked at Mathematica Policy Research as a data associate.

Jonathan Mwaura
Jonathan Mwaura is an associate teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He is broadly interested in general machine learning and artificial intelligence and their applications in robot learning, optimization, data science, and consultancy. Mwaura has worked in multicultural environments through his professional experiences in Great Britain, Kenya, South Africa, and the United States.

Before joining Northeastern, Mwaura taught programming and AI courses at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. He is an artificial intelligence consultant at Vowel Holdings, where he helps organizations identify their problems and uses ML and AI as a tool to solve them. Mwaura received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Exeter in England.

Jose Perea
Jose Perea is an associate professor at Northeastern University, holding a joint appointment with the College of Science and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. His research interests are in applied and computational topology.

Before joining Northeastern, he was an assistant professor at Michigan State University, with joint appointments in the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering and the Department of Mathematics. Between 2011 to 2015, Perea was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Duke University, where he was recognized as among the top five percent of professors at the university. Perea became a member of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 2014.

Perea received his doctorate in mathematics from Stanford University, and a bachelor’s in mathematics from Universidad del Valle, Colombia. He is the Inaugural Mathematical Association of America and National Association of Mathematics (MAA-NAM) Lecturer for 2022-2024. Perea is a 2020 NSF CAREER award recipient, a 2020 Lathisms (Latinxs and Hispanics in the Mathematical Sciences) honoree, and a 2018 Mathematically Gifted and Black honoree.

Vance Ricks
Vance Ricks is an associate teaching professor at Northeastern University, holding joint appointments with the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Ricks earned his doctorate in philosophy from Stanford University. His teaching and research focus on moral philosophy, ranging from the ethics of digital technologies to the works of John Stuart Mill.

Before joining Northeastern, Ricks was an associate professor of philosophy at Guilford College. He has published works on the implications of social networks for friendship and for gossip, and he has forthcoming publications on autonomous vehicles and on the moral worldviews portrayed in so-called “prestige” television shows. He recently helped edit and contribute chapters to the Mozilla Foundation’s Responsible Computer Science Playbook, a guide for both computer science instructors and others who want to incorporate ethical reasoning into their curricula.

Michael Running Wolf
Michael Running Wolf is a clinical instructor at Khoury College of Computer Science’s Vancouver campus. Raised in a rural village in Montana, his grandparents only spoke their tribal languages, Cheyenne and Lakota. Running Wolf’s upbringing led him to pursue endangered indigenous language revitalization using extended reality, specifically augmented reality, and virtual reality. Using tools at the intersection of AR/VR and artificial intelligence, he currently works to strengthen the ecology of thought represented by indigenous languages.

Before joining Northeastern, Running Wolf worked as a software development engineer at Amazon. He received his master’s degree in computer science from Montana State University in Bozeman. Running Wolf has professional experiences with IBM, AT&T Wireless, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

Aarti Sathyanarayana
Aarti Sathyanarayana is an assistant professor at Northeastern University, holding a joint appointment with the Bouvé College of Health Sciences and Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Her research has developed new methods for time-variant health data analysis, signal processing, and machine learning. She aims to translate enigmatic health data into actionable insights, with an emphasis on smartphones, wearables, and electroencephalography.

Before joining Northeastern, Sathyanarayana was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health. She also holds appointments in the clinical data animation center at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Her work strives to improve quality of life and quality of care for all through digital phenotyping and biomarker discovery.

Sathyanarayana received her doctorate in computer science from the University of Minnesota, where her dissertation was selected for the university’s doctoral dissertation award. Since receiving her doctorate, her work has won multiple junior investigator awards from the National Center of Women and Information Technology, American Medical Informatics Association, American Epilepsy Society, and American Clinical Neurophysiology Society. Because of her expertise in the field, she has held positions at Apple, Intel, the Mayo Clinic, and Boston Children’s Hospital.

Saiph Savage
Saiph Savage is an assistant professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston where she directs the Civic A.I. lab. Her research focuses on creating intelligent civic technology to organize collective action for real-world change, which includes fighting misinformation or empowering gig and rural workers to access better jobs.

Savage is one of MIT Technology Review’s “35 Innovators under 35,” a Google Anita Borg Scholarship recipient, and a fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology. She is part of the accelerator program from the Federation of American Scientists where she has created policy briefs that could be implemented by Congress or the Biden-Harris Administration. Her work has been covered in the BBC, The Economist, and The New York Times. She has also been published in ACM CHI, CSCW, and AAAI ICWSM, where she has won honorable mention awards. Savage has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation and the United Nations. She has created collaborations between federal and local governments, driving them to adopt human-centered design and AI to deliver improved experiences and services across nations. Her students have obtained fellowships and internships in industry (Facebook, Twitch, Microsoft, and Twitter) and academia (Oxford Internet Institute).

Savage holds an undergraduate degree in computer engineering from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), and a graduate degree and doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before joining Khoury College, Savage was a tech worker at Intel Labs and Microsoft Bing. She has also worked at the University of Washington in the Human-Centered Design and Engineering Department, West Virginia University, as well as Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

Logan Schmidt
Logan Schmidt is an assistant teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University’s Vancouver campus. They hold a doctorate in rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University, where their doctoral research examined the effective communication of technical and scientific information to lay audiences. They have six years of experience working in research development, first at Tufts University and then at Northeastern, where they built and coordinated cross-disciplinary research teams for projects driven by major grant funding from US government agencies such as the NSF, DOD, and NIH as well as private foundations and corporations.

Schmidt joined Khoury College in 2019 as the assistant director of online programs and played a role in the rapid shift to online learning necessitated by COVID-19. Schmidt is proud to be a product of Khoury’s own Align program and is committed to the mission of CS for all. They have over eight years of teaching experience, including most recently co-teaching CS 5001 with Keith Bagley. Schmidt’s focus on teaching is reflected in their research interests, which include evaluating the efficacy of interventions in CS education.

Sarita Singh
Sarita Singh is an associate teaching professor at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Her areas of interest include cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, software development, data communication, and education technology.

Prior to joining Northeastern University, she was a faculty member at the National University of Singapore. Singh has more than 25 years of work experience in teaching, industry, and research. Over the years, she has worked with various organizations and universities in Singapore, Malaysia, and India. She has also taught undergraduate and graduate courses for UK and Australian degree programs.

Singh received her doctorate in computer science, with a focus on information security, or cryptography. She is the recipient of the prestigious Infosys Fellowship, awarded to promising students to pursue a PhD program. She has presented papers at various national and international conferences, written articles for magazines, and participated as a guest speaker at various public events.

Cheng Tan
Cheng Tan is an assistant professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. In 2020, Tan received his doctorate in computer science from the Courant Institute of New York University. His interests are in operating systems, networked systems, and security.

Tan’s work on the Efficient Server Audit Problem was awarded Best Paper at SOSP 2017. Additionally, his work on data center network troubleshooting at Microsoft Research has been deployed globally in more than 30 data centers in Microsoft Azure.

Melanie Tory
Melanie Tory is the director of data visualization research at Northeastern University’s Roux Institute. Her research focuses on empowering people to make strides with data, through the design and evaluation of novel visualization techniques and human-data interactions. In her previous role at Tableau Software, she managed an applied user research team and conducted research in natural language interaction with visualizations, ultimately commercialized as Tableau’s Ask Data feature. Before that, Tory was a faculty member in visualization at the University of Victoria, where she explored topics such as collaborative visualization and personal visual analytics.

Mohammadhossein Toutiaee
Mohammadhossein Toutiaee is an assistant teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, located in Silicon Valley.

Raimond (Rai) Winslow
Raimond (Rai) Winslow is the director of life science and medicine research and a professor of bioengineering at Northeastern University’s Roux Institute in Portland, Maine.

Winslow joined the Roux Institute from his role as the Raj and Neera Singh Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he was the founding director of the Institute for Computational Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Whiting School of Engineering.

In collaboration with colleagues at Hopkins and around the world, Winslow has contributed to the emergence of computational medicine. His research focuses on two areas. The first is the use of computational modeling to understand the molecular mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmias, or irregular heartbeats, and sudden cardiac death. The second is the use of modeling methods to predict both the evolution of a patient’s health status over time and the impending occurrence of significant adverse events before they occur.

Winslow’s technologies can be applied to understand how real-time health monitoring devices may translate to predictive power for disease outcomes, like stroke, septic shock, heart attack, and more. In his role at the Roux Institute, Winslow will be working directly with founding corporate partner, MaineHealth, to develop the technology that will be used to optimize patient health outcomes.