Faculty Research & Recognition | Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences

The Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS) celebrates the outstanding research, publications, and honors of our faculty. Reflecting CDS’s interdisciplinary focus and societal impact, these achievements span AI, cryptography, biomedical data science, environmental modeling, and public policy. Below is a selection of recent milestones, organized chronologically with faculty listed alphabetically within each period.

January 2026

Yves Atchadé

Publication: Data-Driven Rainfall Prediction at a Regional Scale: A Case Study with Ghana
American Meteorological Society, January 2026

Elizabeth Barnes

Publication: A Deep-Learning Climate Emulator ACE2 Corroborates a Global Decrease in Tropical Cyclone Frequency from 1351 to 1550 Under El Niño-like Sea Surface Temperature Trend
American Meteorological Society, January 2026

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November 2025

Kira Goldner

Award: National Science Foundation Career Award
National Science Foundation, November 2025

Emily Ryan

Award: Duan Family Faculty Fellow
Boston University Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences, 2025

Yves Atchadé

Award: Duan Family Faculty Fellow
Boston University Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences, 2025

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October 2025

Xuezhou (Jack) Zhang, Adrian Whitty

Award: Ignition Awards
Boston University Office of Research, October 2025

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September 2025

Ana Fiszbein

Publication: “Visions of the future of molecular cell biology”
Nature, Published 9/22/2025

Archana Venkataraman

Award:$3.2M to Parse and Predict Post-Stroke Aphasia Recovery
National Institute of Health, 9/23/25

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August 2025

Daniel Segrè

Publication: "Biophysical metabolic modeling of complex bacterial colony morphology"
Cell, Accepted 8/20/25

Vijaya B. Kolachalama, Lingyi Xu, Sahana S. Kowshik

Publication: "AI-driven fusion of multimodal data for Alzheimer’s disease biomarker assessment"
Nature, Accepted 8/11/25

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July 2025

Stefano Monti

Publication: “Head and neck tumor organoid grown under simplified media conditions model tumor biology and chemoradiation responses”
Nature NPJ Biomedical Innovations, Accepted 7/7/25

Vijaya Kolachalama

Publication: "PodGPT: AI model learns from science podcasts to better answer questions"
Nature NPJ Biomedical Innovations, Accepted 7/7/25

Joshua Peterson

Publication: "A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition"
Nature, Published 7/2/2025

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June 2025

Pawel Przytycki

Honor: Named Hariri Institute Junior Faculty Fellow

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April 2025

Joshua Peterson

Publication: "Capturing the complexity of human strategic decision-making with machine learning"
Nature Human Behavior, Accepted 4/8/2025
Publication: “Large Language Models Assume People are More Rational than We Really are”
To appear in the conference proceedings of ICLR 2025

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March 2025

Mayank Varia

Best Paper Award: “Murmurs of the Silenced: Secure Reporting of Misconduct Settlements”
CS & Law Symposium, 3/26/2025

Vijaya Kolachalama

Publication: “Obfuscation via Pitch-Shifting for Balancing Privacy and Diagnostic Utility in Voice-Based Cognitive Assessment”
Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer's & Dementia, 3/14/2025

Brian Cleary

Publication: “Simultaneous CRISPR Screening and Spatial Transcriptomics Reveal Intracellular, Intercellular, and Functional Transcriptional Circuits”
Cell Press, 3/12/2025

Aldo Pacchiano

Publication: “Pure Exploration with Feedback Graphs”
Pre-print, 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 3/10/2025
Publication: “Language Model Personalization via Reward Factorization”
Pre-print, 3/8/2025

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February 2025

Robert A. Brown

Publication: "Don’t Rank Research Universities—Compare Them"
Issues in Science and Technology, 2/26/2025
Opinion: “Will the American Research University Make it to its 100th Birthday?”
Elsevier, 2/14/2025

Jeffrey Considine

Honor: BU Social Scientists Present at New Event That Highlights “Microtalks” by Newly Hired BU Faculty
BU’s Center for Innovation in Social Sciences, 2/20/2025

Mark Crovella and Wesley Wildman

Honor: BU’s “Changemakers”: Crovella and Wildman Named Inaugural Duan Family Faculty Fellows in CDS
Boston University Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, 2/28/2025

Pankaj Mehta

Publication: “Universal Niche Geometry Governs the Response of Ecosystems to Environmental Perturbations”
American Physical Society, 2/13/2025

Aldo Pacchiano

Publication: “Adaptive Exploration for Multi-Reward Multi-Policy Evaluation”
Pre-print, 2/4/2025
Publication: “ORSO: Accelerating Reward Design via Online Reward Selection and Policy Optimization”
Pre-print, The 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, 2/25/2025

Xuezhou Zhang

Publication: “Avoiding exp(Rmax) Scaling in RLHF Through Preference-Based Exploration”
Pre-print, 2/9/2025

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January 2025

Daniel Segrè and Mark Crovella

Publication: “Ligand Interaction Landscape of Transcription Factors and Essential Enzymes in E. Coli”
Cell Press, 1/24/2025

Kira Goldner

Honor: National Science Foundation CAREER award for Multidimensional Utility Maximization when Ordeals are Payments
NSF, 1/15/2025

Jonathan Huggins

Publication: “Quantitative Error Bounds for Scaling Limits of Stochastic Iterative Algorithms”
Pre-print, 1/21/2025

Mayank Varia

Publication: “Haven++: Batched and Packed Dual-Threshold Asynchronous Complete Secret Sharing with Applications”
International Association for Cryptologic Research, 1/13/2025

2024 Research & Recognition

December 2024

Azer Bestavros and Mayank Varia

Project: Long-term Wage Gap Analysis Project for Boston Women's Workforce Council and Massachusetts Executive Office of the Secretary of Labor and Workforce Development
December 2024

Georgios Zervas

Publication: “Learning Product Characteristics and Consumer Preferences from Search Data”<
Informs Marketing Science, 12/10/2024

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November 2024

Jeffrey Considine

Publication: "Compressed Game Solving"
Preprint, 11/15/2024

Mark Crovella

Honor: Mentorship for Simons Foundation 2024 Pivot Fellow Robinson Fulweiler
Simons Foundation, 11/5/2024
Publication: "Beyond Accuracy: Understanding the Performance of LLMs on Exams Designed for Humans”
Preprint, 11/6/2024

Allison McDonald

Publication: "The Sociotechnical Stack: Opportunities for Social Computing Research in Non-consensual Intimate Media"
Association for Computing Machinery on Human-Computer Interaction, 11/8/2024

Aldo Pacchiano

Publication: “A Theoretical Framework for Partially Observed Reward-States in RLHF”
Pre-print, 11/9/2024

Langdon White

Project: Development of Linux Foundation Accrediting Academic Computing Programs KubeCon 2024, Beta, 11/20/2024

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October 2024

Mark Crovella

Publication: "Sparse Attention Decomposition Applied to Circuit Tracing"
Preprint, 10/1/2024

Allison McDonald

Honor: 2024 Google Academic Research Award in Trust and Safety
Google Research, 10/3/2024

Pawel Przytycki

Publication: "Chromatin Remodeling Drives Immune Cell–Fibroblast Communication in Heart Failure"
Nature, 10/23/2024

Wesley Wildman

Publication: "Nightmares in the Elderly: Associations with Self-Reported Executive Functions"
Official Journal of the World Sleep Society and International Pediatric Sleep Association, 10/5/2024

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September 2024

Brian Cleary

Honor: 2024-25 Shibulal Family Career Development Professor in Computing & Data Sciences, 09/25

Kira Goldner

Honor: Paper Presentations at The 17th International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory
SAGT Algorithmic Game Theory, 9/1/2024
Publication: "Non-Adaptive Matroid Prophet Inequalities"
SAGT Algorithmic Game Theory, 9/3/2024
Publication: "To Regulate or Not to Regulate: Using Revenue Maximization Tools to Maximize Consumer Utility"
Association for Computing Machinery Algorithmic Game Theory, 9/3/2024

Aldo Pacchiano

Publication: "Second Order Bounds for Contextual Bandits with Function Approximation" Preprint, 9/24/2024

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August 2024

Mark Crovella

Publication: “An Elemental Decomposition of DNS Name-to-IP Graphs”
IEEE 2024 Annual Joint Conference, 8/12/2024

Jonathan Huggins

Grant: “Using NEON and Other Network Data to Anchor a Continental Multi-Scale Carbon Cycle Assimilation and Forecast”
U.S. National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology, 8/1/2024

Mayank Varia

Publication: "Secure Account Recovery for a Privacy-Preserving Web Service"
Symposium on Edge Computing 33rd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium, 8/14/2024

Xuezhou Zhang

Publication: “Efficient Reinforcement Learning in Probabilistic Reward Machines”
Pre-print, 8/19/2024

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July 2024

Jonathan Huggins

Publication: “A Framework for Improving the Reliability of Black-box Variational Inference”
Journal of Machine Learning Research, 7/2024

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June 2024

Vijaya Kolachalama

Publication: "Prediction of Alzheimer's Disease Progression within Six Years Using Speech: a Novel Approach Leveraging Language Models"
Alzheimer’s Association, 6/25/2024

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May 2024

Ngozi Okidegbe

Publication: "Feminist Cyberlaw Ch. 16; Revisioning Algorithms as a Black Feminist Project"
University of California Press Feminist Cyberlaw, 5/28/2024

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April 2024

Mark Crovella

Grant: National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot Project Award Towards Mechanistic Audits of LLMs
National Science Foundation (NSF) and Department of Energy, 4/20/2024

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March 2024

Ngozi Okidegbe

Publication: "The Outsiders Of Algorithmic Governance”
Preprint, 3/11/2024

Wesley Wildman

Publication: "Dataset of Integrated Measures of Religion (DIM-R). Harmonization of Religiosity Data from Selected International Multiwave Surveys"
The Official Journal of the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion, 3/10/2024

Xuezhou Zhang

Publication: “Scale-free Adversarial Reinforcement Learning”
37th Annual Conference on Learning Theory’s Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, 3/1/2024

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February 2024

Kira Goldner

Publication: "Simple Mechanisms for Utility Maximization: Approximating Welfare in the I.I.D. Unit-Demand Setting"
Preprint, 2/19/2024

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January 2024

Wesley Wildman

Publication: "The Role of Values in Pandemic Management: An Agent-Based Model"
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 1/31/2024