UMIACS Announces Eight New Faculty Appointments

Eight new full-time faculty—three that began their appointments on July 1 and five more who will start in 2022—have joined the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).

These new faculty swell the ranks of the UMIACS research community to more than 75 full-time faculty and research scientists hailing from eight departments in six schools and colleges across the Maryland campus.

“Our newest colleagues bring a substantial array of scientific skills and knowledge to our campus, and a rich diversity of ideas to our research enterprise,” says Mihai Pop, professor of computer science and director of UMIACS. “I look forward to supporting them in their work.”

Starting on July 1 were Daniel Gottesman, Christopher Metzler and Erin Molloy.

Gottesman joined the Department of Computer Science as the Brin Family Endowed Professor in Theoretical Computer Science. He will also have an appointment in the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS) as a QuICS Fellow.

Gottesman’s research focuses on quantum computation and quantum information. He works in the sub-fields of quantum error correction, fault-tolerant quantum computation, quantum cryptography and quantum complexity. He is best known for developing the stabilizer code formalism for creating and describing a large class of quantum codes and for work on performing quantum gates using quantum teleportation.

Gottesman is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was named to the MIT Technology Review's TR100: Top Young Innovators for 2003. He received his doctoral degree in physics from Caltech in 1997.

Metzler is an assistant professor of computer science who started at UMD in January. His research develops new systems and algorithms for solving problems in computational imaging, machine learning and wireless communications.

Before coming to UMD, he was an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellow in the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab. Metzler was also an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, a DoD NDSEG Fellow, and a NASA Texas Space Grant Consortium Fellow. He received his doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University in 2019.

Molloy is an assistant professor of computer science and a member of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

Molloy’s research focuses on designing and implementing phylogeny estimation methods that can effectively utilize distributed-memory systems and that have provable statistical guarantees (e.g., statistical consistency under stochastic models of evolution).

She recently completed a year-long position as postdoctoral researcher in the Machine Learning and Genomics Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. Molloy received her doctorate in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2020.

Joining UMIACS next year are Bahar Asgari, Pablo E. Paredes Castro, Laxman Dhulipala, Jia-Bin Huang and Tianyi Zhou.

Asgari will join UMD in July 2022 as an assistant professor of computer science. She will spend the next year working at Google.

Asgari’s research interests include, but are not limited to, efficiently accelerating sparse problems by enabling stream accesses to memory using hardware/software techniques. She received her doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Tech in 2021.

Paredes will join UMD in July 2022 as an assistant professor of computer science. He is currently an assistant professor in the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Department, and, by courtesy, in the Epidemiology and Population Health Department at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

His research focuses on subtle interventions to reduce stress, such as guiding people to breathe slowly with subtle haptic cues from office or car furniture, and passive sensing of affective and physiological biomarkers derived from existing devices (such as computers, phones, etc.). Paredes earned his doctoral degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2015.

Dhulipala will join UMD in July 2022 as an assistant professor of computer science. He is currently a visiting researcher at Google Research NYC, where he is collaborating with researchers in the Graph Mining team to build practical and theoretically efficient parallel clustering algorithms for sparse graph-based data.

Dhulipala’s research revolves around designing high-performance parallel, dynamic and streaming graph processing algorithms and systems, with a focus on both practical and theoretical efficiency. He received his doctoral degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2020.

Huang will join UMD in August 2022 as a Capital One associate professor in computer science. He is currently a visiting research scientist at Facebook Reality Labs.

Huang’s research interests include computer vision, computer graphics and machine learning with a focus on visual analysis and synthesis with physically grounded constraints. He received his doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2016.

Zhou will join UMD in August 2022 as an assistant professor of computer science after completing his doctoral degree in computer science at the University of Washington, where he is a member of the Machine Learning, Optimization, & Data Interpretation (MELODI) Lab.

His research interests are in machine learning, optimization and natural language processing.

Zhou has previously served as a research assistant at University of Technology, Sydney and Nanyang Technological University. He was also a research intern at Yahoo! Labs and a research intern at Microsoft Research.

—Story by Melissa Brachfeld