About Us
Department Head's Welcome
As the new head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona, I welcome you to our community. Who are we, exactly? The answer changes almost daily as we attract new faculty and students and develop new collaborations with colleagues in the biological sciences, the cognitive sciences, mathematics, and other disciplines here at UA and beyond. In the past year, the department recruited David Lowenthal from the University of Georgia as a full professor, Clayton Morrison and Yu-Han Chang from USC/ISI as research assistant professors, and myself. Thanks to the efforts of Greg Andrews, Kobus Barnard, John Hartman, John Kececioglu, Rick Snodgrass and Suzanne Westbrook, the department helped UA secure a major, $50M award from the National Science Foundation for interdisciplinary work to solve grand challenge problems in the plant sciences, thereby strengthening our collaborations with the BIO5 Institute and our work in computational biology and computational infrastructure for the life sciences. The department is strongly committed to outward-looking computer science and it recently decided to organize research around "focal problems" that afford opportunities for basic research in computer science in the context of societally important challenges. Good focal problems cannot be solved by computer scientists alone, so they create mutual dependencies — the strongest kind of collaboration — between researchers in our department and others at this great university. We are working with our colleagues to refine the department's first focal problems in the areas of computational biology, K12 education, the science of software systems, and security.
The last couple of years have brought substantial increases in research funding, so we are recruiting top undergraduate and graduate students, research professors, and tenure-track faculty. Let me tell you what attracted me to Computer Science at the University of Arizona: The department itself, the excellent ECE and MIS departments, the BIO5 Institute, the cognitive science program, the graduate interdisciplinary program in statistics; the fact that everyone I meet is openly enthusiastic about collaborations with Computer Science and sees computing as an essential part of their research; the agile, forward-looking administration, particularly our Dean in the College of Science, Joaquin Ruiz; and Tucson, itself, a delightful city with excellent schools in a glorious natural environment. I hope you will consider joining our community!
Paul Cohen
Professor and Head