CICS Announces the Hiring of Twelve New Faculty in 2023

The Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at UMass Amherst announces the appointment of twelve new tenure-track and teaching faculty in 2023 for its expanding academic and research programs.

“I want to thank everyone who participated in or supported this amazing effort to support our growing college,” says Laura Haas, dean of CICS. “These new faculty will bring a shot of energy to each of their areas, enriching our community and helping to drive our college forward.”

In addition to these new hires, Gayane Vardoyan (quantum), who was hired in 2020 as an assistant professor, and Chuang Gan (machine learning) and Filip Rozpedek (quantum), who were hired in 2022 as assistant professors, will arrive on campus in the fall of 2023.

The 15 incoming faculty members will bring the college’s cohort of tenure-stream and teaching faculty to 89. Of these current faculty and 17 emeritus faculty, 20 are ACM Fellows, 11 are IEEE Fellows, and 36 are NSF CAREER Award winners.

Eugene Bagdasaryan, Assistant Professor
Security
Starting Fall 2024

Eugene Bagdasaryan is a doctoral candidate at Cornell University. He studies security and privacy in emerging AI-based systems under real-life conditions and attacks, with the goal of building ethical, safe, and private machine learning systems that are practical and useful. He is a recipient of an Apple Scholars in AI/ML fellowship and the Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange Award, among other accolades. He received his bachelor’s and engineer’s degrees from Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Russia.  


 

Pubali Datta, Assistant Professor
Security
Starting Fall 2023

Pubali Datta is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation is on serverless cloud security with a focus on designing information flow control, access control, and auditing mechanisms for serverless platforms. Her research also includes IoT security, system auditing and provenance, and EDR systems. She has held graduate internships at Samsung Research America, SRI International, and VMware. She received her master’s from Jadavpur University and bachelor’s from West Bengal University of Technology in India. 

Mordecai Golin, Senior Teaching Faculty
Starting Spring 2024

Mordecai Golin was most recently a professor in computer science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he received the Michael G. Gale Award for Distinguished Teaching. Previously, he was a researcher in the Projet Algorithmes of the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique in France, and as a visiting researcher for the University of Waterloo, MADALGO Center for Massive Data Algorithms, Max-Planck-Institut fur Informatik, INRIA-Sophia, AT&T Labs-Research, and DIMACS. 
 

Anna Green, Assistant Professor
Computational Biology
Starting Fall 2023

Anna Green is a computational biologist whose research focuses on building accurate and interpretable models to study the variation encoded in genomes. She holds a bachelor’s in molecular and cell biology with thesis research in bioinformatics from the University of Connecticut, and a doctorate in systems biology from Harvard University. As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School Department of Biomedical Informatics, she developed computational and machine learning approaches to study antibiotic-resistant bacteria from their genome sequences. 


 

Shiqing Ma, Assistant Professor
Artificial Intelligence, Security, Software Engineering
Starting Fall 2023

Shiqing Ma recently served as an assistant professor at Rutgers University. He earned his doctorate from Purdue University and his bachelor’s in engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. His research focuses on improving the transparency of modern computing systems, working at the intersection of security, AI, and software systems. He is the recipient of distinguished paper awards from NDSS 2016 and USENIX Security 2017, and an NSF CAREER award. 

Phuc “VP” Nguyen, Assistant Professor
Mobile Health 
Starting Fall 2023

VP Nguyen founded and directed the Wireless and Sensor Systems Laboratory at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he served as assistant professor. His lab, which will move to CICS, focuses on new techniques in sensor and sensing system development, algorithms, data analytics, signal processing, hardware, and firmware optimization to invent new classes of unobtrusive medical devices, plant and animal sensors, and unmanned aerial vehicles. His broad research interests are mobile and ubiquitous computing, wireless communication, and embedded systems.

Mingda Qiao, Assistant Professor
Theory
Starting Fall 2025

Mingda Qiao is a doctoral student at Stanford University, working on the theoretical foundations of machine learning and artificial intelligence, including prediction, learning, and decision-making in sequential settings, as well as decision tree learning. His contributions include the first non-trivial lower bound for sequential calibration and a faster algorithm for properly learning decision trees. He received his bachelor’s in computer science from the Yao Class program at Tsinghua University, China. 

Cole Adam Reilly, Teaching Faculty 
Starting Fall 2023

Cole Adam Reilly’s research focuses on the integration between computer science and other disciplines, most notably the humanities, with interests in game programming, data science, and creating bespoke systems. They are committed to making computer science education as accessible as possible. They received their bachelor’s and master’s in computer science from UMass Amherst and have served as a lecturer in CICS since 2022. They also serve as a computer specialist and researcher for the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Project, Italy. 

Jay Taneja, Assistant Professor
Distributed Computing
Starting Fall 2023

Jay Taneja studies the application of computing tools to managing infrastructure, including energy and building systems, as well as transportation, water, and sanitation systems. He was most recently an assistant professor with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UMass Amherst. Previously, he led the Energy Group at the IBM Research Africa lab in Nairobi, Kenya. He received his doctorate and master’s in computer science from UC Berkeley and his bachelor’s in electrical and computer engineering from The Ohio State University. 

Grant Van Horn, Assistant Professor
Machine Learning and Ecology
Starting Fall 2023

Grant Van Horn was previously a machine learning researcher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, designing intelligent information systems through the combination of humans, machines, and data. His research goal is to build machine learning systems that engage the public and aid scientists in biodiversity and conservation challenges, building on his previous successes including Merlin Sound ID, Seek for iNaturalist, and Merlin Photo ID. He received his doctorate from Caltech in 2018, and his bachelor’s and master’s from UC San Diego. 

Mark Wilson, Senior Teaching Faculty
Starting Fall 2023

Mark Wilson was most recently a visiting associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMass Amherst, previously serving as tenured faculty in computer science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research centers on applications of computer science, mathematics, and data science to social science. He has also been active in computational discrete mathematics. He received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1995, and his bachelor's from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand in 1989.

Juan Zhai, Assistant Professor
Software Engineering
Starting Fall 2023

Juan Zhai was most recently an assistant teaching professor at Rutgers University. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research associate at Purdue University. She also served as an assistant professor at Nanjing University, where she obtained her doctorate. Her research interests lie in software engineering, natural language processing, and security, focusing on specification synthesis and enforcement. She is the recipient of the Distinguished Paper Award of USENIX Security 2017 and the Outstanding Doctoral Student Award in NASAC 2016.