Six UMIACS Faculty Receive Academic Promotions

In recognition of continued excellence in research, scholarship and outreach, six faculty members in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) have received academic promotions from their respective departments, effective July 1.

Michael Cummings (biology), Amol Deshpande (computer science), Najib El-Sayed (cell biology and molecular genetics), Mohammad T. Hajiaghayi (computer science) and Mihai Pop (computer science) have been promoted from associate professor to full professor.

Additionally, Héctor Corrada Bravo (computer science) has been promoted to associate professor with tenure.

“These faculty are all recognized for their outstanding research and passionate commitment toward educating and mentoring students. They are a tremendous asset to our institute, their departments, and the university as a whole,” says Amitabh Varshney, a professor of computer science and director of UMIACS.

Cummings’s research in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB) focuses on computational biology and molecular evolutionary genetics, and includes examining patterns and processes of sequence evolution and the application of grid, public and GPU computing to biological problems.

Deshpande’s research involves query optimization, adaptive query processing, sensor network data management, scalable statistical modeling of data, uncertain data management, and graph databases.

El-Sayed is also member of CBCB, where he focuses on using genomic approaches to investigate the biology of parasitism and host-pathogen interactions, with the ultimate goal of improving understanding of infection and survival mechanisms.

Hajiaghayi conducts research on algorithmic game theory and combinatorial auctions, huge network design, combinatorial optimizations and approximation algorithms, fixed-parameter algorithms, and distributed and mobile computing.

Pop’s research in CBCB involves bioinformatics, genomics, computational biology and software testing. Recent work focuses on the analysis of microbial communities, specifically the microbes that inhabit the human body. Pop has also received funding to redesign the computer science introductory course and incorporates active-learning techniques in his classes.

Corrada Bravo’s work in CBCB focuses on computational genomics and bioinformatics, with specific applications to cancer epigenetics, metagenomics and host-pathogen interaction. He develops innovative methods in data science including visualization, machine learning and computational statistics in response to these applications.