The Department of Computer Science is both proud and privileged to have three of its distinguished faculty promoted to the position of Associate Professor with tenure. Each individual brings an impressive research history, and has made valuable contributions to the field of computer science:
Bijaya Adhikari, Ph.D.
Dr. Adhikari is an expert in epidemiological forecasting and data mining. He joined the University of Iowa in 2020, and authored several important articles on the spread of COVID-19.
As a member of the Computational Epidemiology Group, Adhikari primarily investigates problems motivated by public health such as propagation of diseases via contact network, forecasting outbreaks of infectious diseases —including influenza, and designing optimal surveillance systems.
He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2025, along with generous funding to develop new computational methods to identify the most effective intervention strategies to prevent and stop the spread of healthcare-associated infections.
Send a note of congratulations to Dr. Bijaya Adhikari!
Peng Jiang, Ph.D.
Dr. Jiang's research is forging advancements in high-performance computing, systems, and machine learning.
He received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2025, funding his research into Compiler and Runtime Support for Sampled Sparse Computations on Heterogenous Systems. He has also been the principal researcher on two other NSF grants: The first to develop a new memory management system to facilitate the development of dynamic-memory applications on GPUs. Dr. Jiang later received a second grant of $1 million, alongside his collaborators at Illinois Institute of Technology, for their project Towards A Unified Memory-centric Computing System with Cross-layer Support. The partnership proposes an integrated, full-stack, cross-layer system to enable Unified Memory-centric Computing.
Jiang joined the University of Iowa in 2019 and leads the High-Performance Computing System Group (IOWA-HPC).
Send a note of congratulations to Dr. Peng Jiang!
J. Garrett Morris, Ph.D.
Dr. J. Garrett Morris works with the foundations of programming, empowering programmers to create better-written, better-understood programs. He leads the Iowa Foundations of Programming group and co-leads the Computational Logic Center at the University of Iowa.
Morris joined the University of Iowa in 2020. In 2025, he received a $1.2 million award from the National Science Foundation to develop a method to unify how researchers write, verify, and reuse proofs in mathematics and computer science. This is in addition to two 2024 NSF awards: one to develop a new core language for Haskell, unifying the treatment of type classes and type families, thus simplifying Haskell implementations and making the existing features of Haskell more regular and more expressive. The second, to help undergraduate computer scientists appreciate the relevance of math to CS.
Morris had received his own NSF CAREER Award entitled: "Extensibility in Theory and Practice" in 2021.