The Department of Computer Science welcomes ten of its newest faculty members, joining throughout 2022 and 2023.
Jonathan Calver
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream
Joined July 1, 2022
Jonathan Calver joins the Department of Computer Science as assistant professor, teaching stream. Calver received a BSc double honours in computer science and physics from the University of Saskatchewan and went on to complete an MSc and PhD at the University of Toronto in numerical analysis and scientific computing. Through a teaching-stream postdoctoral fellowship in the department, he turned his focus to CS teaching and education research. His recent pedagogical interests include incorporating active learning into numerical methods courses and how optional group work impacts students.
Niv Dayan
Assistant Professor
Joins January 1, 2023
Niv Dayan will join the Department of Computer Science in January 2023 as assistant professor. Dayan designs and optimizes the data structures used in modern database systems. After completing his PhD at the IT University of Copenhagen, he was a postdoc at both Harvard and Copenhagen University. He has spent the past three years as a research scientist in industry (Pliops & Speedb). Dayan works at the intersection of theory and practice, combining mathematical insight with hands-on engineering. He collaborates with industry partners, especially young startups, to keep his work grounded and helpful to real-world users.
Alice Gao
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream
Joined July 1, 2022
Alice Gao joins the Department of Computer Science as assistant professor, teaching stream. Before joining U of T, Alice was a lecturer in computer science at the University of Waterloo and taught various undergraduate CS courses, including artificial intelligence, logic, and programming. As the Women in Computer Science Committee co-chair at Waterloo, Alice organized many events, including mentoring circles, co-op panels, time management workshops and board game nights. Alice received her PhD in computer science from Harvard University. Her current research interest is in CS education, particularly in helping students develop study skills. Her past research studied information elicitation and aggregation mechanisms theoretically and experimentally. Outside of work, Alice enjoys swing dancing, rock climbing, board games and theatre.
Anna Goldenberg
Professor
Joined August 1, 2022
Anna Goldenberg joins the Department of Computer Science and the Temerty Faculty of Medicine’s Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathobiology as full professor. Goldenberg is a senior scientist in the Genetics and Genome Biology program at SickKids Research Institute, and is also the first Varma Family Chair in Biomedical Informatics and Artificial Intelligence. She is also a faculty member at the Vector Institute and a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Child and Brain Development group. Goldenberg trained in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, with a post-doctoral focus in computational biology and medicine. The current focus of her lab is on developing machine learning methods that capture heterogeneity and identify disease mechanisms in complex human diseases as well as developing risk prediction and early warning clinical systems. Goldenberg is a recipient of the Early Researcher Award from the Ministry of Research and Innovation and a Canada Research Chair in Computational Medicine. She is strongly committed to creating responsible AI to benefit patients across a variety of conditions.
David Lindell
Assistant Professor
Joined July 1, 2022
David Lindell joins the Department of Computer Science as assistant professor. His research combines optics, emerging sensor platforms, machine learning, and physics-based algorithms to enable new capabilities in visual computing. Lindell’s research has a wide array of applications including autonomous navigation, virtual and augmented reality, and remote sensing. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, he received his PhD from Stanford University. He is the recipient of the 2021 ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Dissertation Honorable Mention Award.
Carolina Nobre
Assistant Professor
Joined July 1, 2022
Carolina Nobre joins the Department of Computer Science as assistant professor. She earned her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Utah, and her master's in software engineering at Harvard Extension School. Most recently, she completed her postdoc at Harvard University as a Harvard Data Science Initiative Fellow. Nobre's research focuses on multivariate network visualizations and investigating how visualization literacy can be captured and increased via provenance analysis and experiential learning approaches. Her most recent research grant focuses on investigating how we can better and more efficiently empirically evaluate visualization techniques. Prior to her career as a visualization researcher, Carolina had a previous life as an oceanographer, studying the Arctic Ocean and its effect on our planet.
Gururaj Saileshwar
Assistant Professor
Joins August 1, 2023
Gururaj Saileshwar will join the Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences (University of Toronto Mississauga) as assistant professor in August 2023. He received his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Tech in 2022. His research areas include computer architecture and systems security. Saileshwar’s research enables principled and practical security for computing hardware against side-channels and fault-injection attacks. His recent interests also include enabling efficient system security through hardware-software co-design. Saileshwar’s works have been published in top computer architecture conferences like ASPLOS, MICRO, HPCA, ISCA and security conferences like USENIX Security, S&P (Oakland), and CCS. He has been a recipient of the IEEE HOST Best PhD Dissertation Award and an IEEE Micro Top Picks Honorable Mention. During his PhD, Saileshwar was partly supported by a Georgia Tech IISP Cybersecurity Fellowship and a Bourne Fellowship.
Xujie Si
Assistant Professor
Joins January 1, 2023
Xujie Si will join the Department of Computer Science as assistant professor in August 2023. He is currently an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University and holds a CIFAR AI Chair at Mila. He completed his PhD in computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2020, before which he received his MS and BE in computer science from Vanderbilt University and Nankai Unversity, respectively. His research lies at the intersection of programming languages and machine learning. He is broadly interested in developing learning-based techniques to help programmers build better software with less effort, integrating logic programming with differentiable learning systems for interpretable and scalable reasoning, and leveraging programming abstractions for data-efficient learning. His work has been recognized with ACM SIGPLAN distinguished paper award and several spotlights in top programming languages and machine learning venues.
Ningning Xie
Assistant Professor
Joins August 1, 2023
Ningning Xie will join the Department of Computer Science as assistant professor in August 2023. She received her PhD in computer science at the University of Hong Kong in 2021, and her BS from Zhejiang University in 2015. Before joining U of T, she was a research associate at the University of Cambridge. She also holds an appointment as a research scientist at Google Brain. Xie's research interests are in the field of programming languages, where she applies programming language theory to a variety of domains, including language design, runtime and compiler systems, and machine learning systems. Her research has been recognized by multiple distinguished paper awards from leading programming languages conferences.
Qizhen Zhang
Assistant Professor
Joins August 1, 2023
Qizhen Zhang will join the Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences (University of Toronto Scarborough) as assistant professor in August 2023. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is broadly interested in data management and computer systems and researches across the data processing stack. His dissertation research has been bridging cloud data processing systems and data center networks to address emerging challenges in hyperscale data processing, which is recognized with the 2022 Morris and Dorothy Rubinoff Award for best computer science PhD dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. His work appears at top-tier database and systems conferences. Before joining the Department of Computer Science at U of T, he will spend a year at Microsoft Research as a postdoctoral researcher.