Dr. Dilma Da Silva, department head, professor and holder of the Ford Motor Company Design Professorship II in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, was named interim deputy director of the Texas A&M Institute of Data Science (TAMIDS).
TAMIDS will foster collaborations across Texas A&M and its affiliated agencies, and will support data science applications across the university. The institute, which will be jointly administered by the university, the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) and Texas A&M AgriLife Research, will focus on research, education and outreach.
Da Silva will serve TAMIDS alongside Dr. Simon Sheather, interim director of the institute, professor and academic director of the Master of Science (Analytics) and online programs in the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M.
“I already have my dream job as department head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, but I am very excited about the opportunity that this new role gives me to enable multidisciplinary initiatives that can impact the biggest challenges in our society,” Da Silva said.
Da Silva works in the areas of cloud computing, distributed systems and distance education. Before her current role as department head, she spent 14 years at industry research labs, leading large research projects in distributed computing and operating systems that targeted foundational challenges in the scalability of system software. She is an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Scientist and has published over 80 technical papers and filed 15 patents. She is an associate editor for several journals, has chaired 30 conferences/workshops and participated in over 100 program committees.
Da Silva is a member of the board of the Computer Research Association Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research and a co-founder of the Latinas in Computing group. She served as an officer of the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems from 2011 to 2015, and chaired the ACM Senior Award Committee in 2015.