Hello, world!
It has been another exciting year at Northwestern CS. Our department welcomed several new faculty members this year, including Andrew Crotty, Sam Kriegman, and Miki Racz. We also recently hired three new assistant professors of computer science — Kate Smith, an expert in quantum systems, Karan Ahuja, an expert in HCI, and Manling Li, an expert in AI. In addition, we completed our faculty of instruction hiring cycle and hired Anastasia Kurdia, Rachel Trana, and David Demeter. Together with Joe Hummel, a hire from last year, these efforts substantially strengthen our teaching-track group.
With the launch of our new Research Track, we plan to engage scores of undergraduate students in research. In the fall, a cohort of second-year students will enroll in a Research Track course that will provide a foundational introduction to the research process. In subsequent quarters, students will work with their research adviser and a team of their peers on a collaborative project. This initiative is in addition to supporting undergraduate student research projects via summer internships.
I am delighted to report that several of our top students are headed to graduate school. In addition to Northwestern, destinations include Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Northeastern University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, and University of Toronto.
Our faculty are chairing several major conferences. Simone Campanoni and Nikos Hardavellas were general co-chairs of the 55th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture last fall. Jessica Hullman is a program co-chair of ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT) this June. Jason Hartline is a program co-chair of the Twenty-Fourth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation in London this July.
As we conclude the academic year, we bid farewell to postdocs Sami Davies, Quanquan Liu, and Don Stull as they complete their time with us.
In addition, Jack Tumblin is retiring from the University this summer and we celebrated his 22-year career at Northwestern. Thankfully, he will still be around to teach computer graphics once a year for us.
We look forward to working with incoming Dean Christopher Schuh, who will join us this fall.
With my warmest wishes,
