Six UChicago CS Faculty Receive CAREER Awards
In recent months, six Department of Computer Science faculty received the NSF CAREER award, the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Assistant professors Marshini Chetty, Aaron Elmore, Bill Fefferman, Junchen Jiang, Pedro Lopes, and Blase Ur received the grants in the 2020 cycle, funding their research programs for the next five years. The awards will support research in a broad variety of CS domains, including quantum computing, digital privacy and security, systems, and human-computer interaction.
The grants include:
- Marshini Chetty – “Investigating and Curbing Educational Technologies’ Impact on Schoolchildren’s Privacy”
- Aaron Elmore – “Intermittent Query Processing”
- Bill Fefferman – “Near-term Quantum Computing: Achieving Quantum Advantage, and Next Steps”
- Junchen Jiang – “Enabling Perception-Driven Optimization for Online Videos”
- Pedro Lopes – “Human-Computer Integration: Designing the Next Interface Paradigm”
- Blase Ur – “Usable, Data-Driven Transparency and Access for Consumer Privacy”
All six faculty members joined UChicago CS in the last four years, part of the dramatic expansion of the department and campus-wide initiatives on data science and interdisciplinary computing. Another recent arrival, assistant professor Lorenzo Orecchia, received the CAREER award in early 2020, and assistant professor Chenhao Tan received the award shortly before joining UChicago CS.