The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University welcomes seven new faculty members to the department.
Dr. Theodora Chaspari, assistant professor, received her diploma in electrical and computer engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and her master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California. Chaspari’s research interests lie in the areas of biomedical signal processing, human-computer interaction, behavioral signal processing, data science and machine learning. She is a recipient of the USC Annenberg Graduate Fellowship, USC Women in Science and Engineering Merit Fellowship and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Signal Processing Society Travel Grant.
Dr. Juan A. Garay, professor, received his doctoral degree in computer science from Pennsylvania State University. He was a postdoc at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and held research positions at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Bell Labs and AT&T Labs Research. Prior to joining the department, Garay worked as a senior principal research scientist at Yahoo Research. His research interests include both foundational and applied aspects of cryptography and information security. He has published extensively in the areas of cryptography, network security, distributed computing and algorithms. He has been involved in the design, analysis and implementation of a variety of secure systems, and is the recipient of over two dozen patents. He has served on the program committees of numerous conferences and international panels, including co-chairing Crypto 2013 and 2014, the discipline's premier conference.
Dr. Bobak Mortazavi, assistant professor, received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California Berkeley, and his doctoral degree in computer science from the University of California Los Angeles, where he focused on the development of wearable embedded systems for the Wireless Health Institute. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral associate, and then instructor, in the Department of Internal Medicine, section of cardiology, at the Yale School of Medicine. He has recently focused on clinical research challenges in predictive models and comparative effectiveness techniques, in order to better address the challenges of personalized health monitoring that enable the development personalized and remote monitoring systems for clinical outcomes.
Dr. Zhangyang (Atlas) Wang, assistant professor, received his doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to that, he obtained his bachelor’s degree at the University of Science and Technology of China. Wang's research has been addressing machine learning, computer vision and multimedia signal processing problems using advanced feature learning and optimization techniques. He has co-authored around 40 papers, and published several books and chapters. He has been granted three patents, and has received over 15 research awards and scholarships.
Dr. Tanzir Ahmed, instructional assistant professor, received his doctoral degree in computer science from Texas A&M. Some of his research work is published in IEEE INFOCOM and BIGDATA. His research interests include large scale information processing, web crawling, analysis of random graphs and their crawling, design and analysis of high performance MapReduce, etc. Prior to earning his degree at Texas A&M, Ahmed earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, and worked as a software engineer at Ranks Telecom Ltd.
Dr. Paula deWitte, associate professor of practice, received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and her master’s degree in education from Purdue University. In 2015, she was honored as the Purdue University Department of Mathematics Distinguished Alumna. She received her doctoral degree from Texas A&M in computer science and her doctorate in law from St. Mary's University School of Law. She has worked extensively with startups and spent nine years in Austin with technology companies. Her research interests are in law and policy as related to cybersecurity, as well as risk assessment and management in cybersecurity.
Dr. Shawn Lupoli, instructional assistant professor, has almost 20 years of various teaching experience. Lupoli teaches mostly programming courses from introduction and data structures to web programming. Within the courses he teaches, he has used various active learning and hands-on tools such as flipped, campus-focused projects and Arduinos. He has also served in various administrative positions, such as coordinator of classes, building candidate pools for undergraduate teaching assistants, core curriculum changes, ABET accreditation and mentoring new lecture faculty. He has also received the Graduate Adjunct Professor of the Year award from Hood College in 2012.