Alumni News
M.S. and Ph.D. Alumni
Lee Nackman (Ph.D. 1982) has moved from Microsoft to Hewlett-Packard, where he is now VP of Hybrid IT, leading a worldwide team developing products and services for simplifying management of IT in both on-premise datacenters and in the cloud. Lee, and his wife, Ava Nackman, have relocated from Kirkland, Wash., to Los Gatos, Calif.
Dave Kirby (M.S. 1982) received the Empower Award from the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina for his work in developing the N.C. TeleHealth Network (NCTN). The NCTN project also garnered the Public Leadership Award by the N.C. Technology Association in 2011.
Lenwood Heath (Ph.D. 1985), professor of computer science at Virginia Tech, is Principal Investigator on a recently awarded four-year, $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The project title is ABI (Advances in Biological Informatics) Development: Representation, Visualization, and Modeling of Signaling Pathways in Higher Plants.
In February 2012, Ray Van Dyke, J.D., (M.S. 1989) spoke on patent reform at an IP convention in Las Vegas, taught his course on IP at SMU in Dallas, where he is an adjunct professor in the Engineering School, spoke on copyright law to the DC Chapter of the Sisters in Crime Writers’ group, spoke on IP and patent reform to the Montgomery County, Maryland Bar Association, and was a featured speaker on the history of technology and patent law at the Patent Lawyers Club of Washington, D.C. On April 26, 2012, on World IP Day, he will be a keynote speaker at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s festivities. He also joined the local chapter of SIGGRAPH.
Bill Oliver (M.S. 1990) is professor of pathology at Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., and director of forensic pathology since late 2008. He is chair of the Image Analysis subcommittee of the Scientific Working Group on Imaging Technologies for the FBI, writing best practices guidelines for forensic imaging. He also recently worked with the National Institute of Justice on the evaluation of the safety of electromechanical disruption devices, such as the TASER, and is co-author of the NIJ position paper on the subject. He is on the editorial board of a new journal called Academic Forensic Pathology and remains on the editorial board of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology. He has recently published several peer-reviewed articles on forensics and is presenting in two workshops at the upcoming American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting. He and his wife, Cindy, will soon celebrate their 22nd anniversary, and they love Greenville and spending time enjoying the water, either at the N.C. coast or the Chesapeake.
Gopal Gupta (Ph.D. 1992), currently professor and head of the computer science department at the University of Texas at Dallas, was named the Erik Jonsson Chaired Professor in fall 2011. Gopal continues to do research in logic programming.
Greg Bollella (Ph.D. 1997) was recently promoted to Architect at Oracle America, Inc., and moved back into Oracle Research Labs after five years on the product side.
Daniel Aliaga (Ph.D. 1999), along with his family, just returned from a one year exciting sabbatical to Zurich, Switzerland, where he was a visiting professor first at ETH Zurich Department of Agriculture and later at ETH Zurich Department of Computer Science. He says they enjoyed visiting over a dozen countries while he learned about urban planning and modeling from several international agencies and experiences. Since January 2012, he is back at Purdue University, resuming his duties as Associate Professor of Computer Science.
Ramesh Raskar (Ph.D. 2002), associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, and his Media Lab team have created an ultrafast imaging system that can capture light itself as it passes through liquids and objects. The camera can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. You can read more about the project at http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213.html.
Chris Dwyer (Ph.D. 2003) was promoted to associate professor with tenure last year at Duke University, and was elected a senior member of IEEE and ACM. He was also elected a Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences. He and his wife, Andrea, have three children: Ian, age 5, Olivia, age 3, and Sophia, age 19 months.
Bill Baxter (Ph.D. 2004) left the UNC-alum heavy team (Brandon Lloyd (Ph.D. 2007), Nikunj Raghuvanshi (Ph.D. 2010), and Avneesh Sud (Ph.D. 2006) ) he was on at Microsoft Research in March 2011, and joined the Google Maps team in Seattle. He’s been working on the GPU-based “MapsGL” project that launched as an experiment in October 2011 (you can see the little “Experience MapsGL” teaser if you visit maps.google.com in a browser that supports WebGL). He says to not feel sad about him losing all that UNC-alum camaraderie, however, as at Google he’s working with CS alums Brian Cornell (M.S. 2007) and David Gallup (Ph.D. 2010), and Rahul Raguram (Ph.D. student) was there over the summer.
Jun (Luke) Huan (Ph.D. 2006) was recently promoted to associate professor with tenure in the EECS department at the University of Kansas.
Seon Joo Kim (Ph.D. 2008) joined SUNY (State University of New York) Korea as an assistant professor in January 2012.
Serdar Cakici (M.S. 2011) began working for Measurement Incorporated in Durham, N.C., in January 2012.
Undergraduate Alumni
John Root (B.S.M.Sci. 1994) recently joined Camstar Systems in Charlotte, N.C., as a senior software engineer. Previously he was a senior IT systems analyst at Genworth Financial in Raleigh, N.C.
Michelle Pritchard Turner (B.S.M.Sci. 1996) is an associate director at ICON Late Phase and Outcomes Research in Los Angeles, Calif. She and her husband, Matt, have two-year-old twin daughters named Ava and Coco.
Jed Lau (B.S.M.Sci. 1998) is in the process of launching his startup, Memoir Tree (www.memoirtree.com), which provides an iPhone app to record family history.
Sunil Nagaraj (B.S. 2004) joined Bessemer Venture Partners as a venture capitalist investor in April 2011. He invests in consumer internet companies and would love to hear from you if you’re into startups (even if you’re not looking for an investment -- just to help out).
Erik Andersen (B.S. 2007) is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His team in UW CSE’s Center for Game Science recently received the NHK Japan Prize in the Best Work in Primary Category (The Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Prize) for their game Refraction: Teaching Fractions through Gameplay. The NHK Japan Prize is an international competition for educational media, and Erik traveled to Tokyo in October 2011 to receive the prize. While an undergraduate at UNC, Erik worked with Ming Lin and Dinesh Manocha in the GAMMA group.
ALUMNI PUBLICATIONS
Kathryn Britton (M.S. 1977) is co-author, with Marie-Josée Shaar, of a new book: Smarts and Stamina: The Busy Person’s Guide to Optimal Health and Performance, published in August 2011. The book includes 50 activities for working toward better sleep, food, mood, and exercise habits. Smarts and Stamina was published by Positive Psychology Press. You can find out more at http://www.smartsandstamina.com/the-book/
Gopal Gupta (Ph.D. 1992) published the following papers:
N. Saeedloei, G. Gupta. "Coinductive Constraint Logic Programming." Proc. of Functional and Logic Programming. To appear.
G. Gupta, et al. "Infinite Computation, Co-induction, and Computational Logic." Proc. 4th International Conference on Algebra and Co-algebra in Computer Science (invited paper). Springer Verlag, pp. 40-54.
N. Saeedloei, G. Gupta. "Verifying Complex Real-time Systems with Coinductive CLP(R)." Proc. Languages, Automata Theory and Applications (LATA). 2010. Springer Verlag, LNCS. pp. 536-548.