Purdue CS faculty receive promotions from Purdue's Board of Trustees

04-14-2023

Professors Jeremiah Blocki, Hemanta Maji, Bruno Ribeiro, Jeff Turkstra, and Vassilis Zikas were approved for promotion by Purdue University's Board of Trustees on April 14, 2023.

 

Congratulations to our faculty who received promotions from Purdue University's Board of Trustees.

 

The Purdue University Board of Trustees approved faculty promotions for five Department of Computer Science faculty members on April 14, 2023. The following promotions are effective with the 2023-24 academic year.

 

Jeremiah Blocki, assistant professor of computer science was promoted to associate professor with tenure. 

Blocki's broad research interests include cryptography, data privacy and security. He is a theoretical computer scientist who is interested in applying fundamental ideas from computer science to address practical problems in usable privacy and security. He is interested in developing usable and secure authentication protocols for humans. He received an NSF CAREER award for Cryptographic Tools for Usable Human Authentication. Prior to joining Purdue University in 2016, he completed his PhD on Usable Human Authentication at Carnegie Mellon University where I was fortunate to be advised by Manuel Blum and Anupam Datta. 

 

 

Hemanta Maji, assistant professor of computer science, was promoted to associate professor with tenure. 

Maji's research is in cryptography and algorithms; with special emphasis on secure computation and information-theoretic cryptography. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His thesis was titled, On Computational Intractability Assumptions in Cryptography. He was advised by Manoj Prabhakaran. He joined the faculty at Purdue University in 2015.

 

 

Bruno Ribeiro, assistant professor of computer science, was promoted to associate professor with tenure. 

Ribeiro's research interests are in invariant and causal representation learning, with a focus on sampling and modeling relational and temporal data. He earned his PhD at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and completed a postdoctoral position at Carnegie Mellon University. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2020 for his project, A Novel Blueprint for Representation Learning of Relational Invariances, an Amazon Research Award in 2022, and multiple best paper awards including the ACM SIGMETRICS 2016 best paper award. 

 

Jeff Turkstra, assistant professor of practice, was promoted to associate professor of practice.

Turkstra's research interests revolve around pedagogical tools and support of computer science curriculum with a focus on large enrollment classes. His expertise lies primarily in the areas of operating systems and distributed systems as well as, to a lesser degree, security. Current research activities include PeerVal, a peer evaluation system; C-Lab, a test module framework for C; Eastwood, a code style linter for C; and EnCourse, a system for real-time class project analytics and tracking. All of these systems have been used by thousands of students in dozens of offerings for various courses in the Department of Computer Science.

 

Vassilis Zikas was awarded tenure as the rank of associate professor.

Zikas' research interests are in cryptography, blockchain technologies, security, game theory, and/or fault-tolerant distributed computing. Zikas is the primary investigator and team-leader of a multi-institute collaboration network which was awarded a selectve $8 million Algorand Centers of Excellence grant. Additionally, he leads the leads the Purdue Blockchain lab (The PuB). 

 

 

About the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University

Founded in 1962, the Department of Computer Science was created to be an innovative base of knowledge in the emerging field of computing as the first degree-awarding program in the United States. The department continues to advance the computer science industry through research. US News & Reports ranks Purdue CS #20 and #16 overall in graduate and undergraduate programs respectively, seventh in cybersecurity, 10th in software engineering, 13th in programming languages, data analytics, and computer systems, and 19th in artificial intelligence. Graduates of the program are able to solve complex and challenging problems in many fields. Our consistent success in an ever-changing landscape is reflected in the record undergraduate enrollment, increased faculty hiring, innovative research projects, and the creation of new academic programs. The increasing centrality of computer science in academic disciplines and society, and new research activities - centered around data science, artificial intelligence, programming languages, theoretical computer science, machine learning, and cybersecurity - are the future focus of the department. cs.purdue.edu

 

Writer: Emily Kinsell, emily@purdue.edu