Message from the Chairman
Welcome to the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill). We hope our Web pages will acquaint you with who we are, where we work, what we do, what problems we are working on, and what new and ongoing research directions we are taking. We have the dual missions of pursuing cutting-edge research and of teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. We offer B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science.
Ours is a congenial and informal department in which students and faculty work together on exciting problems. From their very first semester, students are actively engaged with faculty members as colleagues in research and teaching. We offer a wide range of research opportunities, in areas including graphics and image processing; computer architecture; collaborative, distributed, real-time, and parallel systems; data mining and bioinformatics; computational geometry; and others.Our students also learn a great deal from each other as they quickly become a part of our close-knit community.
Two themes pervade much of our research. First, we work collaboratively, and second, we look for real problems whose solutions will do some good. Research clusters of faculty, technical staff, and students collaborate with colleagues in industry, at other academic institutions, and in other departments at UNC-Chapel Hill to solve important and challenging problems. We have ongoing collaborations with radiologists, radiation oncologists, molecular biologists, physicists, chemists, and astronomers, to name but a few. Computer Science is at the center of an intellectual, cultural, and economic revolution. Opportunities for collaboration are virtually limitless.
We receive about $9 million a year in external funding for research projects, infrastructure, and equipment from a variety of federal, corporate, and private sponsors.
Our outstanding faculty continue to win awards for teaching, research, and service. Faculty awards include the A. M. Turing Award, the Bower Award and Prize in Science, NSF Young Faculty CAREER awards, ONR Young Investigator awards, the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, Microsoft New Faculty Fellowships, the Satava Award for contributions to medicine, the UNC Board of Governors' Award for Teaching Excellence, the UNC Chancellor's Award for Excellence (three recipients), North Carolina Professor of the Year, and the North Carolina Governor's Award for Excellence in Service. We also have one National Academy of Sciences and two National Academy of Engineering members.
Chapel Hill is a wonderful place to live; we all take great pride in our charming college town. Our university is consistently ranked as one of the nation's very best. Our department is housed in a state-of-the-art facility built specifically for us. In 2008, we dedicated the Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. Computer Science Building, with is conjoined to Sitterson Hall, and which houses new computer vision, graphics and security lab space.
We appreciate your taking time to learn more about us, and we hope that you will also visit us. Please visit the rest of our web pages to learn more.
Anselmo Lastra
Professor and Chairman