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
Ali Abedi focuses on Wireless networks, cyber-physical systems, privacy and security, Internet of Things (IoT), and battery-free wireless networks. He comes to UW–Madison from the University of California-Berkeley and earned his PhD at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.
Cole Nelson isn’t new to Computer Sciences at UW-Madison: He recently earned an MS in the department. He first got into computer science through MIT’s Scratch coding community and now wants to teach students not only about building web applications and user interfaces but doing so in a secure and usable manner.
Hina Mahmood–Teaching Faculty Hina Mahmood comes to UW-Madison from earning her PhD at McMaster University in Canada. She hopes students will come away from her classes with a robust problem-solving mindset and with the confidence and capability to approach complex problems creatively and tackle them with a lifelong enthusiasm for learning. Mahmood is looking forward to connecting with new colleagues and engaging with students in a fresh and dynamic environment.
Kaiser Pister–Teaching Faculty
Kaiser Pister earned his BS and MS at University of California-San Diego and started three companies. He focuses on machine learning and paradigms of language, and wants his students to gain “critical thinking abilities while reading code and capability in designing new systems.” Pister came to UW-Madison to be “surrounded by incredibly faculty and students.”
Manolis Vlatakis–Assistant Professor
Manolis Vlatakis comes to UW–Madison from a postdoctoral research position at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at University of California—Berkeley after earning his PhD at Columbia University. At UW–Madison he will focus on algorithm analysis, optimization, game theory, dynamical systems, and quantum computing.
Sandeep Silwal–Assistant Professor
Sandeep Silwal joins the Computer Sciences department after completing his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He works in the intersection of theoretical computer science and machine learning. His research focus designs algorithms to compute on large datasets without looking at the entire data.
Tengyang Xie–Assistant Professor
Tengyang Xie comes to UW-Madison from a postdoctoral position at Microsoft Research, New England and New York City Lab. His research goal is to unlock seemingly impossible capabilities through reinforcement learning.
He is interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning, with a particular focus on reinforcement learning (RL) and will be teaching a course in machine learning.
iSchool
Dane Gogoshin–Visiting Assistant Professor
Dane Leigh Gogoshin joins the Information School for an 18-month visiting assistant professorship with a focus on the ethics of data and algorithms. Previously she served as a researcher in the ethics of technology at the University of Helsinki while in pursuit of her PhD in philosophy. This fall she will be teaching LIS 461, Data and Algorithms: Ethics and Policy.
Devansh Saxena–Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor Devansh Saxena comes to the iSchool from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he recently served as Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. His current work is focused on building computational and design frameworks, methods and tools that support participatory AI design and responsible AI innovation.
Rachel Erpelding–Teaching Faculty
Rachel Erpelding is an alum of the iSchool’s MA Library & Information Studies program, graduating in 2016. Most recently, Erpelding was a teaching faculty member at Indiana’s Luddy School of Informatics and Computing. This fall, Erpelding will teach iSchool students the nuances of archives in two courses: LIS 734 (Introduction to Archives and Records Management), and LIS 678 (Preservation and Conservation of Library and Archives Materials).
Statistics
Benjamin Lengerich–Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor Ben Lengerich joins CDIS from MIT, where he completed his postdoctoral training at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His research combines AI with statistical models to solve problems in healthcare and genomics. By dynamically adapting to context, these models not only predict outcomes but also transparently reveal personalized variability. This approach leads to insights that are both accurate and useful for real-world challenges.
Before coming to Madison, Professor Depdeep Pati served on the faculty of the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University for seven years. His research focuses on foundational aspects of Bayesian methods for structured objects ubiquitous in real life such as high-dimensional densities, vectors, matrices, complex shapes, covariance matrices, networks and graphs.
Margaret Thairu serves a dual role as a lecturer in the Department of Statistics and a scientist at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, where she has served since 2022. Also a UW–Madison alum, she received her PhD in Entomology from University of California-Riverside after obtaining an MS in Entomology from the UW. She is interested in understanding symbiotic relationships, especially host-microbe ones. Specifically, she is interested in understanding microbial community dynamics and interactions—both within a community and with a host.
Matthew Bloss–Teaching Faculty
Matthew Bloss served on the Mathematics faculty at Edgewood College for the past seven years before transitioning to UW–Madison. A Badger alum, Bloss earned his PhD in Mathematics from the UW in 2002. He is interested in statistics education and course design aimed at creating impactful learning experiences for his students.
Moumita Karmakar–Teaching Faculty
Moumita Karmakar was an instructional assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University and a research associate at the Data Science Facility Core at The Texas A&M Center for Environmental Health Research. Her research interests involve analyzing high-throughput genomic datasets for statistical patterns and developing statistical methodology for toxicological problems.
Sahifa Siddiqua–Teaching Faulty
Sahifa Siddiqua recently earned her PhD in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Mississippi, where she taught introductory statistics and mathematics courses as a graduate student. She works with stochastic processes, especially Markov Chains. These can be used in financial data where relationships among variables are not linear.
Yuling Yan–Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor Yuling Yan recently completed a one-year stint as a Norbert Wiener Postdoctoral Associate at MIT; he earned his PhD in Operations Research & Financial Engineering from Princeton University in 2023. His research interests are in statistics, optimization, and data science, with a focus on both mathematical theory and practical applications.