Purdue CS welcomes nine new faculty members
09-16-2022
New faculty hires propel Purdue towards our future focus of new research activities and collaborations centered around data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, quantum computing, architecture, and security.
The Department of Computer Science is happy to announce nine new faculty members will join the department from the 2022 hiring effort. They join the department during a large-scale hiring effort across key strategic areas in Purdue University's College of Science. Nine faculty members began work in the fall 2022 semester. Two additional faculty members will join following their postdoctoral programs in the fall of 2023, Wenbo Guo and Sooyeon Jeong.
"Our new faculty members bring expertise in core areas of computing and research that will help Purdue expand our presence and leadership in computer science,” said Sunil Prabhakar, Department Head and Professor of Computer Science. “I am excited for the new faculty to build on our tradition of delivering breakthrough research while educating the next generation of leaders in our field, forging high-impact collaborations across Purdue’s campus and in the broader community – all within an environment that is supportive and welcoming to all.”
Andres Bejarano joins the Department of Computer Science as an 
assistant professor of practice. He earned his PhD in computer science from Purdue University while being a member of the Computer Graphics and Visualization Lab. His research and development interests are in computer graphics, geometry, and scientific visualization.
Aniket Bera joined the faculty as an Associate Professor. He received his PhD
in 2017 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Currently, he is serving as the Senior Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) in the area of Planning and Simulation and the conference chair for the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG 2022). His core research interests are in affective computing, computer graphics (AR/VR, augmented intelligence, multi-agent simulation), social robotics, autonomous agents, cognitive modeling and planning for intelligent characters.
Brian Bullins joins the faculty as an assistant professor. His research 
interests lie at the intersection of optimization and machine learning, both in theory and practice. In particular, he works on improving matrix estimation techniques for faster higher-order methods for convex and non-convex optimization, in both sequential and distributed settings. Previously, he was a research assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). He received his PhD in computer science from Princeton University in 2019.
Xuehai Qian joins the Department of Computer Science as an associate professor.
He leads the Architecture Lab for Creative High-performance Energy-efficient Machines (ALCHEM) at Purdue University. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are in domain-specific system and architecture with focuses on graph processing and machine learning, non-volatile memory system and architecture, performance optimization with machine learning and quantum computing.
Sarah Sellke joins the faculty as an associate professor of practice.
She earned her PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University in 2010 and previously was an associate professor at Northeastern University Khoury College of Computer Sciences and a continuing lecturer in Purdue’s Department of Statistics. An experienced educator within computer science she brings practiced skill to the topics of discrete mathematics, python and java programming, and algorithms.
Eric Samperton joins Purdue University faculty as an assistant professor
in both the Departments of Computer Science and Mathematics. His research focuses on interactions between topology and computer science. He is most interested in 3-dimensional geometric topology and topological quantum field theories, topological quantum computation, quantum and classical algorithms, and complexity. He received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California, Davis in 2018.
Mohammadkazem (Kazem) Taram is an assistant professor in the Department
of Computer Science and he received his PhD degree from the University of California San Diego in 2022. His research interests are in computer architecture and computer security. In particular, he is interested in microarchitectural attacks, high-performance mitigations, and architecture support for security and privacy.
Raymond Yeh joins the faculty as an assistant professor.
Prior to joining Purdue, he was a research assistant professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). His primary area of research is in machine learning and computer vision with focus on developing algorithms to learn effective and explainable models ranging across several domains including audio, vision, language, and multi-agent systems. Yeh completed his PhD in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Ruqi Zhang earned her PhD in statistics and a special MS in computer science
from Cornell University. She is interested in building scalable, reliable, and efficient probabilistic models for machine learning and data science. Zhang’s current focus is on developing fast and robust inference methods with theoretical guarantees and their applications with deep neural networks on real-world big data. Prior to joining the faculty at Purdue as an assistant professor, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning at the University of Texas.