BU Recognizes Two Future Leaders within their Respective Fields

Hariri Institute Affiliated Faculty Members were Acknowledged with Career Development Awards

Sanaz Mobasseri, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Questrom and Derry Wijaya, an assistant professor of computer science at CAS, was recognized as the awardees of 2019 Career Development Awards on Sept. 18, 2019, by Boston University.

Each year, Boston University recognizes a handful of talented junior educators emerging as future leaders within their respective fields through the Career Development Professorship Awards. These professorships highlight the caliber, potential, and continued vitality of Boston University’s diverse faculty.

Sanaz Mobasseri was named as an Isabel Anderson Career Development Professor for her scholarship in discrimination against black job applicants. She is interested in how organizational and social network processes shape gender and race differences amongst employees in the workplace. Recently, she studied almost 400 applications submitted to 184 employers in Oakland, CA. She is a new member of the Junior Faculty Fellows cohort and a Research Fellow at the Hariri Institute for Computing.

Derry Wijaya was named as the University Provost’s Professor. As an expert in machine learning and deep learning applications, she researches natural language processing and knowledge bases. Her studies also include machine translation, which demonstrates how to leverage well-annotated languages to improve the translation of less –annotated ones. She also evangelizes for computer science to middle school girls and low-income students to diversify those working in the field. Derry is a Research Fellow and a member of the core faculty of the AI Research Initiative (AIR) at the Hariri Institute for Computing.

The Hariri Institute initiates, catalyzes, and propels collaborative, interdisciplinary research and training initiatives for a better society by promoting discovery and innovations through the use of computational and data-driven approaches, and advancing computing sciences inspired by challenges in engineering; social, health & management sciences; and the arts.