New Online Expert Faculty Joining Drexel University Online

New Online Expert Faculty Joining Drexel University Online

September 25, 2013

Drexel University Online and the College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) warmly welcomes a set of new faculty members who will be teaching on-campus and online. Take a moment and get to know them!

Dr. Geoffrey Mainland 

Dr. Mainland joins CCI this fall as an assistant professor. Dr. Mainland's research focuses on high-level programming language and runtime support for non-general purpose computation. His work seeks to make it easier to exploit the power of special-purpose devices, like GPUs, that require specialized programming models for optimal efficiency. 

After obtaining an A.B. in Physics from Harvard, Dr. Mainland spent three years working in Silicon Valley. He then returned to Harvard, where he completed a Ph.D. in computer science in 2011. He most recently was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Programming Principles and Tools group at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK). 

Dr. Mainland's research interests span both the systems and programming languages communities. He has published papers at conferences such as Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) and the International Conference on Functional programming (ICFP). 

Dr. Erin Solovey

Dr. Solovey joins CCI as an assistant professor. Dr. Solovey’s main research area is human-computer interaction, with a focus on emerging interaction modes and techniques, such as brain-computer interfaces and tangible interaction. She is particularly interested in designing, building and evaluating systems to support users dealing with high workload and multitasking, as well as systems that provide novel learning experiences. She also investigates effective human interaction with complex and autonomous systems. 

She has received several awards throughout her academic career, including the NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellowship and a CHI Best Paper Honorable Mention Award. Dr. Solovey’s work has been featured in MIT Technology Review, Slashdot, Engadget and others, and she has conducted research at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Microsoft Research. Previously, she was a software engineer at Oracle, and has experience at several startups. 

She received her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Harvard University, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tufts University, where she worked in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. After her graduate studies, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Humans and Automation Lab (HAL) at MIT. 

Dr. Erjia Yan

Dr. Yan joins CCI this fall as an assistant professor. His research interests include network science, informetrics, and scholarly communication, with a focus on using scholarly networks to study scholarly communication. Dr. Yan has published and/or coauthored more than 30 papers in publications such as the Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Journal of Informetrics, Information Processing and Management, Scientometrics, and materials for several academic conferences.

Dr. Yan has also presented talks at STI 2012 (Montreal, Canada), the National Science Library (Beijing, China), CWTS (Leiden University, The Netherlands), ISSI 2011 (Durban, South Africa), ASONAM 2010 (Odense, Denmark), ASIS&T 2010 (Pittsburgh, PA), ISSI 2009 (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), among others. 

He obtained a Master of Information Science and a Ph.D. from the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University, where he also served as an adjunct instructor. 

Dr. Maxwell Young

Dr. Young joins CCI this fall as an assistant professor. Dr. Young’s research addresses the challenges of designing scalable and robust distributed systems where many of the participants are unreliable or even malicious in nature. This work deals with the intersection of security and distributed computing, and often leverages randomized analyses and cryptographic techniques to obtain algorithms with provable guarantees even in the presence of very powerful attacks. 

Dr. Young has published papers at prestigious peer-reviewed conferences such as the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), and in top focused journals such as Transactions on Networking (ToN) and Algorithmica. 

After completing his undergraduate studies in mathematics at Queen's University (Canada) and his master's studies in computer science at the University of New Mexico (USA), Dr. Young obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Waterloo (Canada) in late 2011. Following his graduate studies, he spent one year as a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore, and later was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 

For more information on CCI, please visit: www.drexel.edu/cci. For more information on CCI online programs, please visit: DUO - College of Computing & Informatics.