The Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa is proud to announce that recent donations from alumni/ae and their families will support the recruitment and/or retention of faculty and graduate students.
2024 Emeriti-Faculty Scholar and Emeriti-Faculty Educator Awards
Both awards are made possible by a generous gift from UIowa CS alumni in honor of recently retired UIowa CS faculty. All three accolades bring additional special compensation for 2024-25, 2025-26, and 2026-27. This flexible research funding will support recipients and their labs.
“Scholar” honor is mainly in recognition of recipients' outstanding research achievements as exemplified by their recent CAREER awards.
“Educator” honor recognizes outstanding teaching achievements as exemplified by recent Collegiate teaching awards.
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Rishab Nithyanand — Emeriti-Faculty Scholar Rishab Nithyanand has been awarded as Emeriti-Faculty Scholar. He is recognized for his leadership role in the SPARTA lab. His research is emphasized on privacy and social computing. He aims to to improve transparency and accountability in the online data ecosystem. |
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Peng Jiang — Emeriti-Faculty Scholar Peng Jiang has been awarded as Emeriti-Faculty Scholar, in recognition of his remarkable research achievements. Jiang's primary research interests are in using compiler and runtime support for high-performance machine learning, parallelization for data-intensive and compute-intensive applications, and programming models for irregular applications. For more on Jiang's NSF CAREER Award, click here.
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Elizabeth Kleiman — Emeriti-Faculty Educator Elizabeth Kleiman has been awarded as Emeriti-Faculty Educator. She's recognized for outstanding teaching achievements — She as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa, program Director of ExploreU STEM summer program for middle school girls, and PI for REU - Computing for Health and Well-being. For more on Kleiman's Collegiate Teaching Award, click here. |
Lawrence E. Sheets and Susan J. Sheets Graduate Fellowship Fund
Incoming PhD student Brenden Latham, who has received academic support for 2024-25, reflected on this award earlier this semester:
"I am deeply honored to be receiving the Lawrence E. Sheets and Susan J. Sheets Graduate Fellowship as I embark on my first year of graduate school. Transitioning into a new area of research, particularly reinforcement learning, is both exciting and challenging. Having previously worked on coalition formation in multi-agent systems, I am eager to dedicate my time and energy to exploring new avenues in reinforcement learning. This fellowship provides me with the opportunity to fully immerse myself in this new area of research, exploring innovative solutions to complex problems. I am truly appreciative of the support and confidence that has been placed in me, and I look forward to contributing to advancements in this dynamic field."
In his prior research, supported by a NASA fellowship, Latham focused on coalition formation in multi-agent systems within uncertain environments. Building on this experience, he is now transitioning into the field of reinforcement learning. His goal is to apply his previous experience to develop innovative solutions that enhance agent learning and decision-making in uncertain environments. Currently, he is engaged in early discussions with his advisor, Prof. Mehrdad Moharrami, to explore potential research directions in reinforcement learning, particularly focusing on theory.
