Professor Zhiyuan Li has been appointed a CoS University Faculty Scholar. The University Faculty Scholars Program recognizes outstanding faculty colleagues who are on an accelerated path for academic distinction. This prestigious recognition goes to only 13 faculty in the College of Science, and CS now has 3 faculty who hold this honor, Professor Zhiyuan Li, Professor Walid Aref, and Professor Ananth Grama.

Professor Zhiyuan Li joined Purdue in 1997 as an Associate Professor, and has had a courtesy appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering since 2003. His research interests are in optimizing compilers for high end computing, distributed computing and embedded systems. Li received a National Science Foundation Research Initiation Award and a National Science Foundation Career Award in 1992 and 1995, respectively. In 1998, he co-edited with P.C. Yew a special issue on compilers and languages for parallel and distributed computers for IEEE Transaction on Parallel and Distributed Systems and two special issues on compilers and languages for parallel computing for the International Journal on Parallel Programming. He co-chaired the 10th International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing in 1997 with Professor P.C. Yew, and then co-chaired the same workshop in 2004 with Professors Rudi Eigenman and Sam Midkiff. Li has also served as a program committee member for several international conferences, including IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, International Conference on Parallel Processing, and ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Languages, Compilers and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES).

Professor Walid Aref became a University Faculty Scholar in 2004. His research focuses on developing database technologies that address the needs of emerging non-traditional data-intensive applications, e.g., spatial, multimedia, genomics, and sensor database applications. His contributions are in the areas of (1) new query processing algorithms, (2) indexing techniques and technologies, (3) rank-aware query operators and optimization techniques, and (4) disk scheduling algorithms.

Professor Ananth Grama has been a University Faculty Scholar since 2002. Professor Grama's research interests span the areas of parallel and distributed computing architectures, algorithms, and applications. His work on distributed infrastructure deals with development of software support for dynamic clustered and multiclustered environments. More recent work has focused on resource location and allocation mechanisms in peer-to-peer networks.

Congratulations to Professor Zhiyuan Li for joining the ranks of University Faculty Scholar!