Rishab Nithyanand, an Emeriti-Faculty Scholar, and CLAS Dean’s Scholar in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa, received the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor Award this fall.

Awarded by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), the three-year appointment comes with an annual discretionary research fund of $4,000 which may be used for scholarly work, programmatic enhancements and other initiatives.

Nithyanand, a researcher and expert in privacy and social computing, leads the SPARTA (Sentinels for Privacy-Aware and Responsible Technological Advancement) lab at UIowa. The SPARTA lab is a team of researchers working toward improving privacy, accountability, and safety of Internet-connected emerging technologies and platforms. The team’s goals include achieving a better understanding of the underlying economic, social, legal, and ethical issues that make online privacy, accountability and safety difficult to achieve.

Nithyanand also holds a courtesy appointment in the College of Law and co-directs the Center for Publics, Platforms, and Personalization (CP3). CP3 is an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to studying the relationship between personalization algorithms and society. Their research focuses on the feedback loop between social media users and platform algorithms.

Assistant Professor, Rishab Nithyanand currently teaches a course in Computer Security and a course in Social Computing for both graduate and undergraduate students majoring in computer science or computer science and engineering.