New Year Brings Growth and Change Sina Y. Rabbany, PhD (Bioengineering) Dean, Fred DeMatteis School of Engineering and Applied Science Jean Nerken Distinguished Professor of Engineering sina.y.rabbany@hofstra.edu The new school year brings our largest ever cohort of first-year students to campus. It always takes time for the census numbers to settle, but it appears we may have in excess of 240 new students populating our introductory courses. Interestingly, for the first time that I can recall, the number of entering computer science students is edging out the number of new engineering students. As usual, the summer months were quite active. Our new building is nearing completion on the east side of the campus, close to the other science buildings and the Zarb School of Business. Its location underscores our increasing interaction with these units, especially at the graduate level but also increasingly at the undergraduate level. Soon all of computer science, along with bioengineering and industrial engineering, will migrate to that building, while the vacated areas of Adams and Weed Halls will be filled by the other engineering programs: electrical, mechanical, civil, and engineering science. Also, as has become customary, the summer ended with the presentations of our research students at our 6th Annual ASPiRe Symposium. Over twenty talks representing the culmination of up to three months dedicated work in our labs under the supervision of seventeen different advisors were delivered throughout the day on August 29th. The quality of the work done was truly impressive, given that these are undergraduate students and that many of them will soon have their names attached to scholarly papers and will be representing our school at international conferences. I want to highlight the continued financial support of distinguished members of our Dean’s Advisory Board and other friends of the school in making possible this showcase of academic talent every summer. There are four new full-time faculty on our roster as we start the new academic year. Dr. Minjeong Suh (Environmental Engineering) and Dr. Elliott Williams (Electrical Engineering) both arrived from the west (Stanford and Cal Tech respectively) as they join the Department of Engineering. The Department of Computer Science has also hired two new full-time faculty: Dr. Simon Shamoun, (PhD, CUNY Graduate Center) whose specialty is in mobile and sensor networks; and Mr. Jordan Low (MS, MIT) who has spent two decades developing statistical arbitrage techniques using machine learning and AI. The backgrounds of these two faculty add further depth to the department’s already broad range of research and teaching areas. Lastly, I want to mention that the versatile and scholarly Dr. Edward Currie is taking over as Chair of Computer Science with Dr. Krish returning to the faculty after doing a splendid job in that post
New Year Brings Growth and Change - DeMatteis School of Engineering and Applied Science
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