An exciting and successful faculty recruiting season has allowed us to welcome six new faculty members to our midst in Fall '24:
Katherine Kosaian
Katherine Kosaian is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Iowa, where she is part of the Computational Logic Center. Previously, she completed a one-year postdoc at Iowa State University. Her PhD is from Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department. Her thesis, which won the 2024 Bill McCune PhD Award, was on formalizing algorithms for real quantifier elimination.
Her research interests include formal verification, interactive theorem proving, and ways in which math and computer science intersect. She is particularly interested in formalizing mathematics and algorithms with safety-critical applications.
Note: Kosaian was amongst our 2022-23 recruits, but deferred her joining our department this Fall for a postdoctoral position at ISU.
Erik Krohn
Erik Krohn will be a Professor of Instruction in Computer Science at the University of Iowa. He is a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh, where he has also been the Academic Director for the Masters in Data Science program. He received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Iowa under the guidance of Professor Kasturi Varadarajan. His primary research interests lie in computational geometry, particularly in art gallery and terrain guarding problems. He is also interested in other algorithmic areas, compilers, and programming languages. To explore more of Dr. Krohn’s work, consider viewing some of the software he created and made available for free use on his website.
Lucas Silva
Lucas M. Silva is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Iowa. He recently received a PhD from the Department of Informatics at University of California Irvine. Prior to his PhD studies, he worked as a software engineer and, more recently, as a UX Research intern at Google and Netflix. His research focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating systems to support health and well-being for individuals and families. He uses human-centered design approaches to understand people's perspectives and everyday experiences with technology use, including co-designing interactions and field deployment evaluations of working prototypes. His efforts have been recognized through awards such as UCI’s Public Impact Fellowship, the Fred M. Tonge Endowed Graduate Award, and Rob Kling Memorial Endowed Fellowship. His work has been published in top human-computer interaction venues, including CHI, DIS, IMWUT, and MobileHCI.
Weiran Wang
Weiran Wang is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Iowa. He was most recently a Staff Research Scientist at Google. He was a Senior Research Scientist at Salesforce Research from 2019 to 2020, and a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon Alexa from 2017 to 2019. He spent 2014 to 2017 as a postdoc researcher at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, after obtaining his PhD at University of California at Merced in 2013. His research interests lie in machine learning, speech processing, and optimization.
Muchao Ye
Muchao Ye will be an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Iowa. He received his PhD from the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University in 2024. Before that, he obtained his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Information Engineering at South China University of Technology. His research interests lie in the intersection of AI, security, and healthcare, with a focus on improving AI safety from the perspective of adversarial robustness. His research works have been published in top venues including NeurIPS, KDD, AAAI, ACL, and the Web Conference.
Tianyu Zhang
Tianyu Zhang will be an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Iowa. Prior, he was a postdoc fellow in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Connecticut (UConn). Before joining UConn, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research falls in the area of real-time cyber-physical systems (CPSs) with a focus on designing resource management frameworks and developing theoretical foundations for mission-critical CPS applications.
In addition to the above faculty members, we are pleased to share that Naimul Hoque will be joining us in Spring '25! Hoque will be an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Iowa. He expects to receive his PhD from the College of Information Studies (iSchool) at the University of Maryland, College Park this fall. He obtained a Master's in Computer Science from Stony Brook University in 2020 and a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2015. During his graduate studies, he worked with Professor Niklas Elmqvist in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), one of the oldest and most well-known HCI research labs in the U.S. His research focuses on designing, building, and validating AI-infused applications using interactive visualization. He has published works at top-tier HCI and visualization venues such as ACM CHI, IEEE VIS, ACM CSCW, and ACM DIS during his PhD.
