The Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University has grown extensively since it was established in 1969. This year, the department received a record-high number of student applications for enrollment, approximately 3,000 applications for only a few hundred seats. To accommodate the growing demand for the program and to continue to lead innovative and exciting research projects in computer science, the department continues to expand its impressive faculty.

This fall Stony Brook’s Department of Computer Science (CS) welcomed four new Assistant Professors: Nima Honarmand, Nick Nikiforakis, Minh Hoai Nguyen, and Robert Patro.

Nima Honarmand– Honarmand, whose expertise is in computer system design, received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2014, Honarmand was a recipient of the W.J. Poppelbaum Memorial Award for academic merit and creativity in the field of computer architecture. This semester he is teaching Operating Systems.

Nick Nikiforakis- Nikiforakis is part of the cybersecurity cluster hiring initiative for fall 2014. His academic interests include web security and privacy, software security and intrusion detection. Nikiforakis received his PhD in Computer Science from KU Leuven in Belgium.

Minh Hoai Nguyen– Nguyen received his PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and he was a research fellow of the Visual Geometry Group at Oxford University in England. His research focuses on computer vision, machine learning, human activity recognition, and semantic video analysis. In 2012, Nguyen was honored with the CVPR best student paper awards, and was a winner of PASCAL VOC 2012 Challenge for Human Action Recognition.

Robert Patro.– Before joining Stony Brook, Patro completed his postdoctoral research in computational biology at the Lane Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Patro received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Maryland at College Park. Patro’s research interests involve scalable algorithms for high-throughput genomic analysis, biological networks, and network evolution and systems biology.

Some of these new faculty members are part of the Stony Brook University Interdisciplinary Faculty Cluster Hiring Initiative, which will hire 250 new faculty members in the coming years. The goal of the initiative is to build intellectual capital and expand teaching and research in emerging fields. The CS department’s National Security Institute (NSI) at Stony Brook University continues to recruit additional faculty members who are well versed in a variety of research areas, including cybersecurity, risk modeling and social engineering.