Four CS Faculty Members Awarded NSF CAREER Award

The National Science Foundation has selected four members of the Purdue Computer Science Department to receive Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards. Alan Qi, Charles Killian, Ramana Kompella, and Olga Vitek were chosen for their accomplishments and future plans in research and teaching.

The NSF CAREER Award supports “junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research,” to build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research. This program is the most prestigious award offered by NSF in support of junior faculty

Prof. Sunil Prabhakar, interim head of Computer Science, noted that “to have four Purdue Computer Science faculty members recognized for their research is a truly exceptional accomplishment and speaks to the intellectual energy of the department and the college.”

Alan Qi’s award will fund research involving data and its growing complexity coming from multiple sources with multiple aspects. This presents unprecedented opportunities to integrate data with predictive models to extract complex relationships among natural and man-made objects.

Qi received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2005 and worked as a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2005 to 2007. He joined the CS Department in fall 2007, and has a joint position with the Department of Statistics.

Charles Killian will use the funding from his award to reduce developer effort necessary to design, update, and debug distributed systems, and to inspire the creation of a new class of systems debuggers, analyzing not just correctness, but also performance and complexity.

Killian received his PhD in computer science from the University of California, San Diego, his MS in computer science from Duke University, and his BS in computer science and applied math from North Carolina State University. He joined the department in fall 2008.

Ramana Kompella’s project aims to develop novel tools and techniques that will help build a high-fidelity knowledge plane for data centers. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of California, San Diego, his MS in computer science from Stanford University, and a BTech in computer science and engineering from IIT Bombay. He joined the department in fall 2007.

Olga Vitek’s award, "CAREER: Sparse-sampling inference for functional proteomics, metabolomics and ionomics", will support the development of statistical and computational tools for functional proteomics, metabolomics, and ionomics, with the goal of increasing the sensitivity, accuracy, and scope of the investigations. The activities will contribute to bridging the communication gap between biologists, chemists, and statisticians, and promote computational thinking and the appropriate use of statistical methodology.

Vitek received her PhD in statistics from Purdue University, her MS in mathematical statistics from Purdue University, another MS in econometrics and statistics from the University of Geneva, and her BS in econometrics and statistics also from the University of Geneva. She joined the CS Department in 2006 and has a joint appointment with the Statistics Department.