The School of Computer, Data, & Information Sciences is excited to welcome several exceptional faculty to our growing school. Learn more about our new faculty below:
Computer Sciences
Ethan Cecchetti- Assistant Professor
Ethan Cecchetti joins the UW-Madison Computer Sciences department from a postdoctoral position at the University of Maryland. His research aims to better understand the security of complex computer systems and how we can more easily and effectively build new systems securely. His teaching aims to help students understand and think about security in an increasingly digital and connected world.
Tej Chajed- Assistant Professor
Tej Chajed joins the UW-Madison Computer Sciences department from a postdoctoral position at VMware Research. His research focus is systems verification, and he is “working on tools to make it easier to prove that a distributed system eventually makes progress and processes requests.”
The Information School
Emilee Rader-Associate Professor
Emilee Rader comes to the iSchool from Michigan State University, where she worked in the Department of Media and Information for 12 years as an assistant professor, associate professor, and most recently, associate department chair. Rader studies how people make decisions about data collection and digital technologies. Her work aims to better understand why individuals struggle to manage their privacy and discover new ways to help people exert more control over their information
Rick Wash-Associate Professor
Rick Wash comes to the iSchool from Michigan State University, where he served as assistant professor then as associate professor affiliated with both the Department of Media & Information and the School of Journalism. Wash’s research focuses on information security and online communities, with an emphasis on the ways people protect themselves from Internet-based or other technology-related risks.
Clinton Castro-Assistant Professor
Clinton Castro served previously in the Department of Philosophy at Florida International University for five years, where he was an assistant professor and director of the Program in Ethics, Artificial Intelligence & Big Data from 2021 to 2023. Castro’s work explores information ethics, including how new technologies can present thorny moral and ethical problems related to human autonomy and attention.
Chaowi Xiao-Assistant Professor
Chaowi Xiao worked most recently at Arizona State University as an assistant professor in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence. Xiao’s research investigates the intersections of security, privacy, and machine learning with the goal of building socially responsible machine learning systems.
Statistics
Matthias Katzfuss- Professor
Matthias Katzfuss joins UW–Madison after spending a decade on the faculty at Texas A&M University. Katzfuss conducts interdisciplinary research related to computational spatial and spatio-temporal statistics, Gaussian processes, uncertainty quantification, and data assimilation.
Yongyi Guo-Assistant Professor
Yongyi Guo comes to the Department of Statistics as an assistant professor after holding a postdoctoral researcher position in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. Her work encompasses various areas, including statistical reinforcement learning, distributed learning, experimental causal inference, and high-dimensional statistics.
Rishabh Dudeja-Assistant Professor
Rishabh Dudeja is joining the Department of Statistics after serving as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. Dudeja’s research interests lie at the intersection of high-dimensional statistics and applied probability. He is particularly interested in understanding phase transitions, universality phenomena, and computational-statistical trade-offs in modern high-dimensional inference problems.
Chris Geoga-Assistant Professor
Chris Geoga joins UW–Madison Statistics after finishing his PhD at Rutgers University in the summer of 2023. Geoga previously worked at Argonne National Laboratory, as an assistant computational mathematician in the Math and Computer Science Division. His work focuses on modeling complex dependence structure in spatial and spatio-temporal data, particularly in the physical sciences.