9/12/2024 Bruce Adams 8 min read
Fourteen new faculty members have been hired by the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, where they join a group of accomplished researchers and educators. Nine joined the school for the Fall 2024 semester, one will begin in January 2025, and six will begin their positions in Fall 2025.
Written by Bruce Adams
Sixteen new faculty members have been hired by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, where they will join a group of accomplished researchers and educators. Eight will join the school for the Fall 2024 semester, one will begin in October 2024, one in January 2025, and six will begin their positions in Fall 2025.
The Grainger College of Engineering's new arrivals adds wide-ranging areas of expertise and interest—from quantum to bioinformatics, computational biology, audio coding, and interactive computing—furthering the school's depth and breadth in scholarship, research, and education.
Associate Professor Minje Kim
Minje Kim joined the faculty in January 2024. He is a CS alum, completing a PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2016. Kim is also an Amazon Visiting Academic working at Amazon Lab126. He was an associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington from 2016-2023. Kin worked as a researcher at ETRI, a national lab in Korea, from 2006 to 2011. He received his MS and BS degrees in the department of computer science and engineering at POSTECH and in the division of information and computer engineering at Ajou University in 2006 and 2004, respectively. Kim’s research interests are AI for Audio, Model Compression, Personalized AI, Signal Separation, Speech Enhancement, Neural Speech, and Audio Coding. He has been an inventor on more than 60 patents.
Assistant Professor Tal August
Tal August will joined the faculty in August 2024. He is a Young Investigator (postdoc) at the Allen Institute for AI on the Semantic Scholar team and recently finished his PhD at the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. August’s interests lie in Interactive Computing. He studies ways to adapt language styles to different people, building tools to make language adaptation automatic.
Clinical Associate Professor Reza Farivar
Resa Farivar will take a position as an Associate Professor in August 2024. His research area is Systems and Networking.
Teaching Assistant Professor Max Fowler
Max Fowler took a position in the Fall of 2024. He joins the faculty after receiving the 2024 Broadening Participation in Computing Fellow and being named a 2022 Lifetime Teaching Assistant Award winner as a computer science PhD student at The Grainger College of Engineering Department of Computer Science. His thesis title is “Strategies and Exercises for Assessing Code Writing and Reading Ability at Scale.”
In 2019, CS professor Craig Zilles began designing a program to offer a Teaching Endorsement in Computer Science to high school teachers. Fowler was one of three PhD students who built out course content for the program. Fowler holds a bachelor of science degree in computer science and a master of science degree in applied computer science from Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
Assistant Professor Fernando Granha Jeronimo
Fernando Granha Jeronimo joined the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science faculty as an assistant professor in August 2024. He comes to Illinois from the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been investigating problems involving coding theory, expanders and high-dimensional expanders, optimization such as the sum-of-squares hierarchy, representation theory of the symmetric group and quantum.
Assistant Professor Fan Lai
Fan Lai joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in August 2024. He is a Visiting Faculty researcher in Systems Research at Google and obtained a PhD from the University of Michigan in 2023. His research interests lie in Systems Networking and AI, bringing together machine learning, systems, and computer networking to develop practical systems for efficient pervasive ML and data analytics in the cloud and up to the planetary scale.
Assistant Professor Ge Liu
Ge (Tiffany) Liu took a position on the faculty in August 2024. She joins Illinois from AWS AI Labs, where she was a Senior Applied Scientist. Her PhD thesis won the MIT EECS George M. Sprowls Ph.D. Thesis Award in AI and Decision-Making in 2021. Her research is in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and AI, developing uncertainty-aware, reliable, efficient, and interpretable machine learning and optimization techniques and novel experiment frameworks and computational tools for solving important problems in synthetic biology, immunology, and molecular biology that go beyond predictive modeling.
Assistant Professor Billy Moses
Billy Moses joined the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science as an assistant professor in August 2024. Moses obtained his undergraduate degree and PhD at MIT. His research interests are in compilers and high-performance computing, including applications to machine learning, climate science, databases, security, and biology,
Assistant Professor Jiaxuan You
Jiaxuan You joined the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science as a full-time faculty member in August 2024, after working as a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA. He received PhD and MS degrees from the computer science department at Stanford University. Data and Information Systems and AI are areas of research interest for him and he has worked on deep learning for graphs, relational data, and databases, and is excited about knowledge-augmented LLMs and multi-modal foundation models.
Starting in January 2025
Assistant Professor Francis Yan
Francis Yan is a researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond. In January 2025, he will join the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science faculty as an Assistant Professor with an affiliate appointment at ECE. His research primarily focuses on enhancing networked systems with machine learning.
Starting in Fall 2025
Assistant Professor Kate Donahue
Kate Donahue will join the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science faculty as an assistant professor of computer science in Fall 2025. Before this, for the '24-'25 academic year, she will be pursuing a METEOR postdoc at MIT. She is a final-year PhD candidate in computer science from Cornell University, where she interned at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft Research. She also holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard, with a math major and a statistics minor. Donohue will be working in Theory, Interactive Computing, and Artificial Intelligence at Illinois, reflecting her research on algorithmic problems relating to the societal impact of AI, such as fairness, human/AI collaboration, and game-theoretic models of distributed learning.
Teaching Assistant Professor Livingston McPherson
Livingston McPherson received their BS from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2015 and an MS from the University of California—Berkeley in 2018. They continued at Berkeley for a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and completed their thesis studies in 2022 by combining cognitive science with AI to create transparently safe human-robot collaborations. Now, they mentor students in research and scientific communication to discover how intelligent machines can support human understanding through active collaboration. They join the faculty in August 2025.
Assistant Professor Ge (Tiffany) Wang
Ge (Tiffany) Wang will join the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science faculty as an assistant professor in August 2025. She is completing her PhD at the University of Oxford's computer science department. Wang’s research is in Interactive Computing, investigating the algorithmic impact on families and children and what that means for their long-term development. She is keen to explore the potential for designing more age-appropriate AI for children.
Associate Professor Xiaojing Liao
Xiaojing Liao will join the faculty as an associate professor in Fall 2025. She is currently at Indiana University Bloomington, where she received an Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award and an NSF Career Award. Her interests include discovering and understanding critical security issues in large systems through data-oriented security analysis and designing and developing innovative solutions to address these issues. She received her PhD from Georgia Tech.
Associate Professor Luyi Xing
Luyi Xing will join the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science faculty in August 2025. He currently holds a position as an associate professor in the computer science department at Indiana University Bloomington. Xing joined Indiana in 2018 after experience building large commercial systems at Amazon/AWS. He currently directs the System Security Foundations Lab at Indiana.
Associate Professor Shuang Zhao
Shuang Zhao will join the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science faculty as an associate professor in Fall 2025. Zhao is an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and co-direct UCI's Interactive Graphics & Visualization Lab (iGravi). He received the NSF CAREER award in 2023. Before joining UCI, he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT. Zhao obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University in 2014.
He has worked mainly in physics-based computer graphics and scientific computing with a focus on modeling and simulating light transport in complex environments.