Institute Announces 2018 Junior Faculty Fellows

The Hariri Institute for Computing at Boston University is pleased to announce its eighth cohort of Junior Faculty Fellows. They are:

The Hariri Institute Junior Faculty Fellows program was established in 2011 both to recognize outstanding junior faculty at Boston University working in diverse areas of the computational sciences, as well as to provide focal points for supporting broader collaborative research in these areas at BU and beyond. Junior Fellows are selected by the Hariri Institute Steering Committee based on nominations received each spring, and are appointed for a three-year term.

The Institute’s Junior Faculty Fellows demonstrate the benefits achieved in making the leap from quantitative, statistically-driven research to computational, algorithmically-driven research, and the program’s success is a tell-tale sign of the increasing importance of the Institute’s mission of bringing the computational lens to bear on our data-driven world.

Commenting on this eighth cohort of Junior Faculty Fellows, Professor of Computer Science and Hariri Institute Founding Director Azer Bestavros said he fully expects to see each fellow develop their research portfolios and grow their academic careers just as their predecessors were able to do.

“The Junior Faculty Fellows is the first program we started at the Hariri Institute,” Bestavros said. “Now, many of our Junior Faculty Fellows are full professors and very successful. They’re sitting on my steering committee, running labs of their own… It’s rewarding to see where our fellows have been and how far they’ve come.”

Over the next academic year, each of the Junior Faculty Fellows will be giving a lecture at the Institute. For more information and to receive notices about this and other Institute activities, please join our mailing list by becoming an affiliate member or by subscribing to the Institute’s mailing list for general announcements. For more information, please visit our web site or connect via Facebook and Twitter.

About the Fellows

Image of Jennifer BalakrishnanJennifer Balakrishnan is a number theorist working on explicit methods for curves. Her research is motivated by various aspects of the classical and p-adic Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjectures, as well as the problem of algorithmically finding rational points on curves. She is currently the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Boston University. Previously, she was a Titchmarsh Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, a Junior Research Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard. Balakrishnan received an AB and AM from Harvard University and a PhD in Mathematics from MIT.

Research keywords: rational points on curves, elliptic curves, low genus curves, Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, Coleman integration, p-adic heights, p-adic cohomology

Tasso Kaper, chair of the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, said that “having earned her PhD from MIT and carried out postdoctoral work at Harvard and Oxford Universities, Professor Jennifer Balakrishnan is a rising star in mathematics. She has already published an astonishing 24 original research articles, many in the top mathematics journals. In these, she has made a series of path-breaking contributions to number theory, arithmetic geometry, and computational number theory. Jennifer is also a leader in the development of computational algorithms to discover new mathematical results, including the SAGE open-source software that plays an increasingly important role in number theory research throughout the world. Moreover, as an exceptionally dynamic mathematician, she is sought after as a faculty mentor by many postdocs, PhD students, and undergraduates, and she has given more than 80 invited research talks throughout the world.”

Image of Mahesh KarraMahesh Karra is an assistant professor of global development policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. His academic and research interests are, broadly, in development economics, health economics, quantitative methods, and applied demography. His research utilizes experimental and non-experimental methods to investigate the relationships between population, health, and economic development in low- and middle-income countries. He has conducted field work in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, and his current research uses randomized controlled trials to evaluate the health and economic effects of improving access to family planning and maternal and child health services in Malawi, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania. He has also worked for the Population Reference Bureau and the Futures Group International and served as a consultant to the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the Population Council. Mahesh holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and Hispanic studies (Joint Hons) from McGill University, an MSc in Economics from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, and an ScD in Global Health Economics from Harvard University.

Research keywords: development economics, health economics, maternal and child health, applied demography, population economics, applied econometrics, impact evaluation

Kevin Gallagher, professor of global development policy and director of the university-wide Global Development Policy Center, said the GDP Center is “proud that Mahesh Karra has been selected as a Junior Faculty Fellow. Dr. Karra blends development economics, public health, and big data in pursuit of policy-oriented results that make the world a better place. In addition to being a blossoming assistant professor at the Pardee School, he is also an associate director at the GDP Center’s Human Capital Initiative, which will benefit greatly from the fellowship.“

Image of Vijaya KolachalamaVijaya B. Kolachalama is an assistant professor in the section of computational biomedicine in the Department of Medicine. He is a translational scientist with a laboratory focused on developing machine learning and image processing algorithms for disease risk assessment and designing software technologies to assist therapeutic development and clinical decision-making. He is also the course director and primary instructor of Machine Learning for Biomedical Applications, taught within the Graduate Medical Sciences program at the BU School of Medicine. His research focus for over a decade has been within the cardiovascular domain, specifically on endovascular device-based therapies. He is currently collaborating with leading BU researchers to investigate other disease areas including chronic kidney disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and osteoarthritis. Before joining BU, he held multiple appointments including principal member of technical staff at Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, ORISE Fellow at the United States Food and Drug Administration, and postdoctoral associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He obtained a PhD degree from the University of Southampton, UK, in 2006 and a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, in 2002.

Research keywords: machine learning, image processing, deep learning, adversarial learning, computational pathology, cardiovascular devices, vascular drug delivery, chronic kidney disease, Alzheimer’s disease, osteoarthritis

David Coleman, chair of the Department of Medicine, said “Vijaya Kolachalama joined the Department of Medicine’s Section of Computational Biomedicine in 2017. Since joining the faculty, Dr. Kolachalama has established a remarkably productive series of collaborations with investigators having a shared interest in using machine learning approaches to analyzing biomedical data. He has been particularly effective in employing machine learning in analyzing radiologic and histologic images. In addition, Dr. Kolachalama has developed a very popular new course on Machine Learning in the School of Graduate Medical Sciences which experienced a doubling of the enrollment from the first to the second year! He is a highly valued member of our department and is bringing important new analytic approaches to biomedical problems.”

Image of Wenchao LiWenchao Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the BU College of Engineering and directs the Dependable Computing Laboratory. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are in dependable computing, with a current focus on applying formal methods and machine learning techniques to problems in cyber-physical systems, electronic design automation, and AI safety. His awards include the ACM Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation and the Leon O. Chua Award for outstanding achievement in nonlinear science.

Research keywords: human cyber-physical systems, formal methods, design automation; AI safety

Professor W. Clem Karl, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering , said that “Wenchao is one of (ECE’s) energetic rising stars. We are delighted that he was selected as a Hariri Junior Faculty Fellow! Wenchao applies computational proof methods and machine learning techniques to produce safe, reliable and secure systems, such as self-driving cars. These challenges are increasingly important as intelligence and autonomy become ever more prevalent in society. Wenchao is an ideal Hariri Junior Faculty Fellow connecting the role of computing across multiple domains and applications.”

Image of Christoph NolteChristoph Nolte studies the effectiveness of international and domestic land conservation efforts. His research asks: where does conservation happen? Why there? And what difference does it make? His research relies on large spatial datasets, long-term satellite observations, economic theory, quantitative causal inference, and field research. Nolte is the lead developer of PLACES (Private Land Conservation Evidence System), a novel database that facilitates the study of conservation effectiveness on millions of private properties in the United States. He conducted empirical research in more than 20 countries in Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, and works in English, German, French, and Spanish.

Research keywords: conservation, private lands, remote sensing, spatial big data, quasi-experimental causal inference, automated valuation

Professor Anthony Janetos, chair of the Department of Earth & Environment, said that “Christoph Nolte joined Boston University in 2016.  His current research focus, which would provide the core of his effort should he be selected a Hariri Junior Faculty Fellow, is development of new algorithms and models that can be applied to large-scale datasets with the goal of understanding and identifying optimal allocation of existing and potential conservation interventions. Because such intervention are inherently spatio-temporal, these models require data at fine spatial and temporal resolution, but are applied at continental scales, which presents substantial modeling and computational challenges.  Examples include cost, allocation, and impact assessment of private land protection across both North and South America.”

Image of Babis TsourakakisCharalampos (Babis) Tsourakakis is an assistant professor in computer science and a research associate at Harvard. He obtained his PhD in algorithms, combinatorics, and optimization at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Alan Frieze, was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University and Harvard under the supervision of Eli Upfal and Michael Mitzenmacher, respectively. Before joining BU, he worked as a researcher in the Google Brain team. He won a best paper award in IEEE Data Mining, has delivered three tutorials in the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, and has designed two graph mining libraries for large-scale graph mining, one of which has been officially included in Windows Azure. His research focuses on data mining and machine learning with a strong focus on large-scale networks.

Research keywords: data mining, graph mining, machine learning, algorithm design

Abraham Matta, chair of the Department of Computer Science, said that the department “is delighted that Charalampos (Babis) Tsourakakis has been selected as a Hariri Junior Faculty Fellow. He is an excellent example of the kind of scientist that would contribute to the mission of the Institute in supporting the role of computing across disciplines. Babis is well known for developing provably efficient algorithms for machine learning and data mining problems involving massive networks. These networks model a wide variety of large datasets from protein interactions to social media. His work has important broader impacts, for example, in discovering new breast cancer types, in understanding colon cancer progression, and in developing new ways for influencing the formation of opinions online.”