Get to know four recently hired faculty members, joining the Department of Computer Science throughout 2024 and 2025. We extend a warm welcome to the newest members of our departmental community.
The newest faculty members of the Department of Computer Science.
Top row left to right: Paul He, Anwar Hithnawi
Bottom row left to right: Zhijing Jin, Aviad Levis
Paul He
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream
Joined August 1, 2024
Paul He joins the Department of Computer Science as assistant professor, teaching stream. Paul completed his bachelor’s in computer science at the University of Waterloo and received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in August 2024. At the University of Pennsylvania, his research was in the field of programming language theory. He also served as an instructor for six semesters during his PhD, teaching introductory computer science, theory of computation, and C++ programming. He received the Outstanding Teaching Award from Penn Engineering and the Graduate Fellowship for Teaching Excellence from Penn’s Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Innovation.
Anwar Hithnawi
Assistant Professor
Joins January 1, 2025
Anwar Hithnawi will join the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in January 2025. She currently leads the Privacy-Preserving Systems Lab at ETH Zürich, which she established after receiving the SNSF Ambizione grant, an early-career research grant, in 2020. Before this, Anwar was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, and she completed her PhD at ETH Zürich prior to that.
Anwar’s research focuses on data privacy, applied cryptography, and systems, with a particular emphasis on usable cryptography and privacy-preserving systems. She has received several prestigious awards throughout her career, including the SNSF Ambizione grant, Facebook and Google Research Awards, and the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship.
Zhijing Jin
Assistant Professor
Joins July 1, 2025
Zhijing Jin will join the Department of Computer Science in July 2025 as assistant professor. Her research focuses on causal methods for natural language processing (NLP), with applications in AI Safety and AI for Science. She also has a keen interest in political analysis to uncover causal effects from text data. Her PhD is from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ETH Zürich, and she holds an Honours Bachelor’s degree from the University of Hong Kong. She actively organizes workshops to promote the responsible use of NLP, and runs ACL Year-Round Mentorship to equalize research resources to underrepresented groups. Zhijing has received three Rising Star awards and two PhD fellowships in recognition of her work.
Aviad Levis
Assistant Professor
Joined July 1, 2024
Aviad Levis joined the Department of Computer Science in July 2024 as assistant professor. His work focuses on developing computational imaging tools for scientific discovery. After completing his PhD at the Technion in 2020, he joined Caltech as a postdoc working on imaging black holes with the Event Horizon Telescope. His research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and physics, working on interdisciplinary inverse problems in diverse fields, from astrophysics to climate.