{"id":272,"date":"2020-06-22T15:29:55","date_gmt":"2020-06-22T19:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/?page_id=272"},"modified":"2026-04-28T16:54:50","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T20:54:50","slug":"past-faculty-fellows","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/culture-community\/faculty\/past-faculty-fellows\/","title":{"rendered":"Former CDS Faculty Fellows"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"BUMargrit Betke (2016-2019)<\/h2>\n
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Professor Betke has been a member of BU\u2019s Computer Science faculty since 2000 and co-leads the Image and Video Computing Research Group in her department and the AI Research Initiative at the Hariri Institute for Computing. Her current work applies machine learning and computer vision to such areas as medical imaging, interfaces for people with disabilities, assessing home-based physical therapy, quantifying political bias in the news, and analyzing online product availability and pricing in relation to world events. A senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), she has published extensively in premier journals and is supported by several major grants from the National Science Foundation and Google. She holds a PhD and MS in electrical engineering and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.<\/p>\n

Discover more about Margrit<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\"\"John Byers (2017-2020)<\/h2>\n
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Professor Byers has been a member of BU\u2019s Computer Science faculty since 1999 and a Hariri Institute Fellow since 2012. His academic research is data-driven and centers on two disciplines: the science of computer networking and the empirical study of online platforms, notably Airbnb, Groupon, and Yelp. His academic honors include an NSF CAREER Award and two test-of-time paper awards at ACM SIGCOMM and IEEE ICDE. Since 2005, he is also the founding Chief Scientist at Cambridge-based Cogo Labs, an incubator and startup accelerator leveraging world-class proprietary technology in digital marketing. Professor Byers holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. in Computer Science, Economics, and Mathematics from Cornell University.<\/p>\n

More on John\u2019s academic and entrepreneurial background here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"BUChris Chao Su (2022-2025)<\/h2>\n
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Chris Chao Su is an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Studies at the College of Communication and the East Asia Studies Career Development Professor at BU. His research focuses on online media audiences, social media analytics, and mobile media use and consumption. Broadly speaking, his research explores how media audiences take shape in an increasingly fragmented digital media environment using computational methods. His previous work also examines the diverse effects of media affordance, with respect to the relationship between social media use and political behaviors. He holds a PhD in Communication from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, an MA from New York University, a BA in Journalism from Wuhan University with a minor in Computer Science. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen prior to joining Boston University.<\/p>\n

Learn more about Chris<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"BUChristine Cheng (2018-2020)<\/h2>\n
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A member of the BU faculty from 2016 to 2020, Christine Cheng integrates cell and molecular biology with computational approaches to help understand and identify potential therapeutic targets to diseases including Alzheimer\u2019s disease, HIV infection, and opioid addiction. Her current projects are focused on massively-parallel single-cell transcriptomic and epigenetic profiling. Christine has recently received significant grant support from NIH. She is a past recipient of the NIH\u2019s Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Fellowship and has published numerous articles in top journals including Nature Genetics, Nature Communications, Science Signaling, and Cell Systems. She is a graduate of National Taiwan University and holds a PhD in bioinformatics and systems biology from University of California, San Diego and an MS in computer science from Stanford University.<\/p>\n

Explore Christine\u2019s research<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"\"Mark Crovella (2018-2021)<\/h2>\n
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A member of BU\u2019s Computer Science faculty since 1994 and past department chair, Mark Crovella works to improve the understanding, design, and performance of parallel and networked computer systems \u2013 mainly through the application of data mining, statistics, and performance evaluation. His recent work has focused on the analysis of social and biological networks with applications to recommender systems, public opinion analytics, and computational biology. He is an elected fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), holds 10 patents derived from his research, and has published a book and more than 200 widely-cited papers on networking and computer systems. He holds a doctorate from the University of Rochester, a master\u2019s degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a bachelor\u2019s degree from Cornell University.<\/p>\n

Learn more about Mark Crovella<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"\"Ana Fiszbein (2022-2025)<\/h2>\n
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Ana Fiszbein joined the Biology faculty in January 2021. Drawing on molecular, computational, genomics, and evolutionarily approaches, her research focuses on the mechanisms, regulation, and evolution of mammalian gene expression. Her current projects are focused on understanding the mechanistic connections between transcription and splicing in human transcriptomics, and their dysregulation in cancer. Her recent sponsors include the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Massachusetts Life Science Center, and the Smith Family Foundation. She is the 2021 Innovation Career Development Professor at BU and a Junior Faculty Fellow of the Hariri Institute for Computing. The author of seminal articles published in top journals, book chapters, and patents, Ana holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Buenos Aires and was trained as a postdoctoral fellow in Computational Biology at MIT.<\/p>\n

Learn more about Ana<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"BUAhmed Ghappour (2017-2020)<\/h2>\n
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Professor Ghappour has been a member of the BU faculty since 2017. His cross-disciplinary research focuses on the interplay between emerging technologies and law enforcement, particularly in the context of the modern surveillance state and cybersecurity. Prior to his legal career, Professor Ghappour was a computer engineer focused on design automation, diagnostics, distributed systems architecture and high performance computing. He holds a law degree from New York University School of Law and a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Rutgers University.<\/p>\n

From criminal law to computer security, learn more about\u00a0Ahmed<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"BUJonathan Huggins (2019-2022)<\/h2>\n
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Jonathan Huggins joined the Mathematics & Statistics faculty in January 2020. His research centers on the development of fast, trustworthy machine learning and AI methods that balance the need for computational efficiency and the desire for statistical optimality with the inherent imperfections that come from real-world problems, large datasets, and complex models. In addition to affiliations with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, he has published over a dozen papers in leading statistics and machine learning journals and conference proceedings. He received his doctorate and master\u2019s degree in computer science from MIT and his bachelor\u2019s degree in mathematics from Columbia University.<\/p>\n

Dive into Jonathan\u2019s research<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"BUEric Kolaczyk (2016-2019)<\/h2>\n
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Eric Kolaczyk has been a member of the Mathematics & Statistics faculty since 1998 and is director of the department\u2019s Program in Statistics. He is an internationally recognized leader in statistics at its interface with multi-scale and network analysis, whose applied work has had broad implications in areas including bioinformatics, computational neuroscience, computer network traffic analysis, and social work. The author of three books and dozens of widely cited journal articles, he is a senior member of IEEE and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Statistical Association, and the International Statistical Institute. He is a graduate of The University of Chicago and holds a PhD and MS in statistics from Stanford University.<\/p>\n

Dig deeper into Eric\u2019s current research interests<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"\"Dokyun Lee (2022-2025)<\/h2>\n
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Dokyun \u201cDK\u201d Lee is a Kelli Questrom Chair Associate Professor of Information Systems and Digital Business Fellow at Questrom School of Business. He studies the responsible application, development, and impact of AI in e-commerce and the digital economy with a heavy focus on the economic impact of textual data along with content extraction, understanding, and engineering. He runs the Business Insights through Text Lab<\/a>. He is a recipient of ISS Gordon B David Young Scholar and MSI Young Scholar Awards. His research has won multiple best paper awards and is supported by organizations such as Adobe, Bosch Institute, Google Cloud, Marketing Science Institute, McKinsey & Co, Nvidia, and Net Institute.<\/p>\n

Learn more about DK<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"BUElaine Nsoesie (2018-2021)<\/h2>\n
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Dr. Nsoesie applies data science methodologies to global health problems, particularly in the realm of surveillance of chronic and infectious diseases. Her previous research has centered on the modeling of infectious diseases, using statistical and computational approaches to better understand the spread of disease and improve public health practice. She is currently focused on machine learning frameworks for monitoring risk factors for chronic diseases using social media data and on quantifying and addressing bias in digital data used in public health research. She has published extensively in premier health, technology, and informatics journals and received significant grant support from NIH and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is a graduate of University of Maryland College Park and holds a PhD in genetics, bioinformatics, and computational biology and an MS in statistics, both from Virginia Tech.<\/p>\n

Find out how Elaine is working to improve global health<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"BUDebarghya Mukherjee (2022-2025)<\/h2>\n
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Deb Mukherjee will be starting as an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics in Fall 2023, after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of Michigan where his research focused on the analysis of complex statistical models, especially in high dimensions, where the geometry of the problem becomes extremely relevant. Beyond dealing with independent data settings, Deb is now starting to explore models that capture data dependency, e.g., spatial or temporal dependence under some mixing conditions. He is also actively working on algorithmic fairness, domain adaptation, and domain generalization, all of which fall within the purview of constrained classification. One of his key goals is to delve into the connections among these fields that allow the development of machine learning methodologies for the optimal transfer of knowledge from one domain to another while preserving fairness. More on Deb\u2019s background is available on his website.<\/p>\n

Learn more about Deb<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"BUFrancesco Orabona (2018-2021)<\/h2>\n
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A member of the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department from 2018 to 2023, Francesco Orabona’s work is in Optimization and Machine Learning. His research bridges the mathematical foundations of learning theory and data science, with applications to scientific, societal, and real-world engineering problems. It has led to the development of autonomous online learning algorithms that require minimal human supervision \u2013 first-of-its-kind work that is now part of Microsoft\u2019s Machine Learning toolkit. The author of more than 60 peer-reviewed articles, he is a graduate of University of Naples (Italy), where he additionally earned his MS in electrical engineering. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from University of Genoa.<\/p>\n

Learn about Francesco\u2019s work.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"BUYannis Paschalidis (2016-2019)<\/h2>\n
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Yannis Paschalidis has been a College of Engineering faculty member since 1996 and is director of the BU-based Center for Information and Systems Engineering. An internationally-recognized leader in systems and control, networks, decision theory, optimization, and operations research, he is currently developing predictive analytics with applications to a number of areas with significant impact on society, including computational biology, digital health, smart cities, and transportation systems. He is a fellow of IEEE, the founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, and has published extensively in top scientific and engineering journals. A graduate of National Technical University of Athens (Greece), he holds a PhD and MS in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition to Electrical & Computer Engineering, he holds affiliated appointments with Systems Engineering and Biomedical Engineering.<\/p>\n

Explore Yannis\u2019s interests and publications<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"BUKate Saenko (2017-2020)<\/h2>\n
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Kate Saenko has been a member of the Computer Science faculty since 2016 and is director of BU\u2019s Computer Vision and Learning Group, where she specializes in machine learning, concentrating on the development of new systems to enhance vision and language understanding. The recipient of several active federal grants supporting her research into artificial intelligence, she has published extensively in leading computer science journals, serves as program chair for the 2020 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, and in 2017 received the Most Innovative Solution award, alongside her students, in the IEEE Large-Scale Activity Recognition Challenge. She holds a doctorate and master\u2019s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and a bachelor\u2019s degree in computer science from University of British Columbia.<\/p>\n

Find out more about Kate, the Computer Vision and Learning Group, and the Artificial Intelligence Research initiative\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"BUVenkatesh Saligrama (2017-2020)<\/h2>\n
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Venkatesh Saligrama joined the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering in 2001, where he explores problems arising in machine learning, statistical signal processing, and control and information theory. His recent research has focused on machine learning under budget constraints, identifying racial and gender bias in AI systems, and developing new tools for video analytics in highly cluttered and urban scenarios. An elected fellow of the IEEE, he is a past recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award, NSF CAREER Award, and Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. He has edited a book, published dozens of widely-cited articles and papers in leading journals and conference proceedings, and is incoming chair of the Big Data Special Interest Group of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He received his doctorate and master\u2019s degree from MIT and his bachelor\u2019s degree from Indian Institute of Technology in Madras.<\/p>\n

Learn more about Venkatesh.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"AdamAdam Smith (2017-2020)<\/h2>\n
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Professor Smith arrived at BU in 2017 as the first faculty member recruited through the Data Science Initiative. He has earned international recognition for founding a new field within data science that puts on solid bases the modeling and evaluation of the privacy of individuals in the age of big data. Over the last few years, his research sponsors have included NSF, NIH, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Google, and the Sloan Foundation. He is a past recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, a U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and the G\u00f6del Prize for writings on theoretical computer science. Professor Smith holds a doctorate and a master\u2019s degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor\u2019s degree in mathematics and computer science from McGill University. In addition to Computer Science, he holds a secondary appointment as Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and an affiliated appointment as Professor of Mathematics & Statistics.<\/p>\n

Learn more about Adam<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Margrit Betke (2016-2019) Professor Betke has been a member of BU\u2019s Computer Science faculty since 2000 and co-leads the Image and Video Computing Research Group in her department and the AI Research Initiative at the Hariri Institute for Computing. Her current work applies machine learning and computer vision to such areas as medical imaging, interfaces […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16543,"featured_media":0,"parent":138,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/272"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16543"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":37,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19972,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/272\/revisions\/19972"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}