Dear colleagues,

I completed three years at Northwestern University in March. It has been a real privilege to join this amazing community of scholars and leaders in the research community.

Our department has grown visibly in size, stature, and reputation. Today we have more than 1,000 CS majors and minors, and several robust master’s programs. Our PhD program has grown to around 130 students and improved from No. 30 to No. 28 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings for 2023 Best Computer Science Doctoral Programs. Meanwhile, we continue to run PhD programs in conjunction with other Northwestern schools, such as the CS+LS program (with the School of Education and Social Policy) and the Technology and Social Behavior program (with the School of Communication). Indeed, interdisciplinarity is woven into our very fabric, and we have a variety of productive collaborations with many departments within McCormick as well.

We now have 46 tenure-track faculty and 12 teaching-track faculty, and with strong support from Dean Ottino and his leadership team, we are in the process of expanding this number. Our newest faculty members are V.S. Subrahmanian, who arrives from Dartmouth; Emma Alexander, who was a post-doc at the University of California, Berkeley; and Xinyu Xing, who was on the faculty at Penn State University. Andy Fano joined Northwestern's MBAi program as codirector in early April after 25 years at Accenture Labs, where he most recently was the global managing director of artificial intelligence (AI) research and development.

In addition, I am excited to announce that we have hired Joseph Hummel as a full professor of instruction, bringing with him several decades of experience teaching undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He will join us this summer. Zach Wood-Doughty will be promoted from McCormick Teaching Fellow to an assistant professor of instruction in September.

Andrew Crotty, currently a postdoctoral researcher with a joint appointment in the computer science departments at Carnegie Mellon University and Brown University, will begin in September as an assistant professor. His research primarily explores the design of systems for large-scale data analytics and data science. Sam Kriegman will also join us this fall as assistant professor with a joint appointment in chemical and biological engineering and mechanical engineering. His research involves computational approaches to the automated design and manufacture of mechanical, chemical, and biological robots. Miklos Racz, a joint faculty member with CS and the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, will start in January 2023. His research interests lie broadly at the interface of probability, statistics, information theory, and computer science.

My goal for the next year is to focus on our most underutilized resource — our amazing students! We hope with the right guidance and mentoring they will flourish, make us proud, and be the best ambassadors for Northwestern CS.