Tanima Chatterjee Joins the CDS Faculty at BU
Boston University warmly welcomes Tanima Chatterjee as Clinical Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS).
“I am delighted that Tanima has chosen to pursue her lifelong love of working with students as a teacher and as a mentor at BU,” said Associate Provost of CDS , Professor Azer Bestavros. As a Clinical Assistant Professor, Tanima’s primary responsibilities revolve around teaching basic competencies and practical skills that are necessary for students to tackle more advanced subjects and pursue applications that require practical knowledge.
Tanima brings with her several years of experience working with data, clearly exemplified by her postdoctoral work at Yale University. It was there that she collaborated with molecular biologists on the use of fairly elaborate graph theoretic concepts. While projects such as these may seem like an intimidating concept to some, Bestavros noted that “Tanima has an uncanny ability to break down very advanced math concepts into intuitive nuggets that are easy for students to digest.”
Tanima completed her doctoral studies in Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2021. Her research embodies the transdisciplinary approach to computing and data science that the Faculty of CDS strives to achieve. “There is data everywhere,” Tanima says. “What I look forward to doing is making coherent sense of it.” In her PhD thesis, she focused on the analysis of the human brain connectome using network topology to study neurodegenerative diseases. “The human brain always intrigued me and that led me to my thesis project, which I extended during my postdoctoral training,” said Tanima who continues to be actively involved in the second phase of the PsychENCODE Consortium project at Yale University’s molecular biology department.
Having grown up in a family of educators, teaching has always been Tanima’s passion. Reflecting on how her research on the human brain connectome reinforces her passion for teaching, Tanima says: “Above all, I strongly believe that the human mind is a blank slate that can do wonders, and nothing can be more satisfying than being an integral part of this (r)evolutionary process.”