Our People - Professors

Yousra Aafer will be joining the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science on January 1, 2020 as an Assistant Professor.

Yousra currently is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University under the supervision of Professor Xiangyu Zhang. Her research interests span the areas of systems security and software engineering, specifically focusing on mobile and smart devices security. 

She received her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Syracuse University and was advised by Professor Wenliang Du. Her previous research mainly tackled Android security.

At Purdue University: yaafer@purdue.edu 
At the University of Waterloo: yousra.aafer@uwaterloo.ca

Shalev Ben-David joined the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor on July 1, 2018 after a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Maryland.

His research interests are in classical and quantum complexity theory. 

Trevor Brown will be joining the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in fall 2018.

Trevor is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto.

Although he was in the theory group at  the University of Toronto, his research is closer to systems work than theory. He cares greatly about rigour, whether in theoretical or experimental work. His research currently revolves around concurrent data structures, especially lock-free ones. He is also interested in transactional memory, non-volatile memory, and techniques for coping with non-uniform memory architectures.

Kimon Fountoulakis is an Assistant Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science and a member of its Scientific Computation Group.

Previously, Kimon was a postdoctoral fellow and Principal Investigator at University of California Berkeley in the Department of Statistics and ICSI. He worked with Michael Mahoney. Before that he completed a PhD in optimization at University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Professor Jacek Gondzio. 

Kimon's most recent work focuses on large-scale optimization and its application to local graph clustering. He has also worked on parallelizing optimization and local graph analytics algorithms.

Kimon's past work includes higher-order optimization methods for machine learning and signal processing problems.

Xi He will be joining the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in spring 2019.

Xi graduated from National University of Singapore with double degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. 

She recently completed her PhD at Duke University, working with Prof. Ashwin Machanavajjhala. Her research interests span the areas of privacy and security for big-data management and analysis.

Gautam Kamath will be joining the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in July 2019.  

Gautam is currently a PhD student at MIT, affiliated with the Theory of Computing group at CSAIL. He is interested in principled tools for statistical data science, with a focus on settings that are common in settings of modern data analysis (high-dimensions, robustness, and privacy). 

He will be a Simons-Berkeley Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing for the fall 2018 semester program on Foundations of Data Science and the spring 2019 semester program on Data Privacy: Foundations and Applications. 

Chengnian Sun will be joining the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in July 2019.

Chengnian's research interests are in software engineering and programming languages, focusing on techniques, tools and methodologies for improving software quality and developers’ productivity. He has a PhD in Computer Science from National University of Singapore and a Bachelor of Software Engineering from Northeastern University in China.

Chengnian is currently a software engineer at Google Inc. in Mountain View, California.

Olga Veksler's research interests are in developing robust and efficient algorithms that automatically interpret visual information. In particular, she is interested in visual correspondence (stereo, motion) and image segmentation. Optimization techniques are of fundamental importance to computer vision problems. In her research, she finds graph algorithms and dynamic programming particularly useful for efficiently solving optimization problems arising in vision.