Drexel University’s College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) warmly welcomes the following new faculty members:
M. Brian Blake, PhD
Drexel University Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
M. Brian Blake, PhD joined CCI faculty this summer as Distinguished Professor of Systems and Software Engineering in CCI’s Department of Computer Science. Blake comes to Drexel from the University of Miami, where he set research and teaching priorities and led faculty enhancement efforts as vice provost for academic affairs, and oversaw 155 graduate programs serving more than 5,700 students as dean of the Graduate School. Previously he was associate dean for research and graduate studies in the University of Notre Dame College of Engineering, and chaired the Georgetown University Department of Computer Science as it launched its first graduate program. Blake has directed computer science labs funded by more than $10 million in sponsored research awards; authored 170-plus publications and chaired six conferences; edited major journals including his current service as editor-in-chief of IEEE Internet Computing; and advised dozens of students at every level from postdoctoral fellowships through doctoral, master’s and undergraduate studies. Blake is a Senior Member of the IEEE and ACM Distinguished Scientist. Blake’s industry experience includes six years as a software engineer and architect at Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and The MITRE Corporation before entering academia full time. Blake also holds appointments in the College of Engineering (as professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering) and in the College of Medicine (as professor of neuroengineering). He earned his doctorate in information and software engineering from George Mason University, a master of science degree in electrical engineering from Mercer University, and a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Mark Boady
Mark Boady joins CCI faculty this fall as assistant teaching professor. His interests include computer algebra, specifically how to automate complex symbolic calculations, and how computer algebra systems can be used to enhance learning. He is currently a doctoral candidate at CCI, advised by
Professor Jeremy Johnson, PhD and Associate Professor Pavel Grinfeld, PhD, where he researches automating the computation of problems in the Calculus of Moving Surfaces (CMS). He has taught CCI courses in areas such as the mathematical foundations of computer science and programming languages. He earned a master of science degree in computer science and a bachelor of science degree in computer science (cum laude) from Drexel University.
Matthew Burlick, PhD
Matthew Burlick, PhD joins CCI faculty this fall as assistant teaching professor. His research interests include topics in image processing, machine learning, real-time video tracking, object detection and classification, statistics/probability, and acoustics. Burlick previously served as assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, where he instructed in undergraduate courses in areas such as scientific computing, discrete structures, algorithms, and interactive computer graphics, and also co-taught their capstone senior design course with a focus on software engineering. His work can be generalized as real-time multi-sensor fusion for detection and classification. This work results in extensive experience choosing feature vectors, building classifiers and creating unique clustering algorithms, often relying on temporally relative data. He earned his doctorate in computer science and a master of science degree in computer science from the Stevens Institute of Technology, and a bachelor of electrical engineering degree with a concentration in computer engineering from the University of Delaware.
Colin Gordon, PhD
Colin Gordon, PhD joins CCI faculty this fall as assistant professor. His interests include finding new ways to improve software reliability, especially providing strong static guarantees about program behavior, for concurrent and systems-level code. His previous work has focused on the formal verification of concurrent programs; he is also interested in other levels of formal assurance, programming models, distributed computing and testing. Gordon, whose industry experience includes working in an operating system incubation group at Microsoft and in Network Appliance Inc.'s filesystem group, previously served as senior research engineer at Samsung Research America. He earned his doctorate and a master of science degree from the University of Washington (with a focus on formal verification of concurrent programs) and a bachelor of science degree (ScB) from Brown University.
John D’Ignazio, PhD
John D’Ignazio, PhD joined CCI faculty this summer as assistant professor. D’Ignazio has explored a variety of disciplines to understand and develop human interaction with complex information systems and abstract information domains. This focus prepared him to participate in the application of librarianship theory and skills to a new class of digital objects important in the conduct of science, where practices are rapidly changing due to the increasing use of information and communication technology (ICT). As part of this librarianship-centered research and development, he helped design and then taught a science data management course, and explored metadata’s central role in this topic area. D’Ignazio recently defended his doctoral dissertation in information science and technology from Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies (iSchool), entitled “Digital Curation on a Human Scale: Investigating information infrastructures and environments to support technology-enabled science.” This work develops concepts and methods needed to curate the digital information resources and structures of increasingly strategic value in many ICT-dependent professional domains, including the sciences. He also holds a master of design degree in interaction design from Carnegie Mellon University, a master of arts degree in journalism from the University of Maryland at College Park, and a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Lehigh University.
Alex Poole, PhD
Alex Poole, PhD joins CCI faculty this fall as assistant professor. His research interests center on digital curation, digital humanities, pedagogy, diversity and inclusivity in the LIS profession, and all matters archival. Poole previously served as teaching fellow at the UNC Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, where he taught in areas such as archives and records management, digital humanities, and information resources and services. Among other venues, his work has been published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, American Archivist, and Archival Science. He received the Theodore Calvin Pease Award from the Society of American Archivists for his article “
The Strange Career of Jim Crow Archives: Race, Space, and History in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South” [pdf]. He earned his doctorate (dissertation title: “Forging Our Cultural Commonwealth: the Importance of Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities”) and a master of science degree in library science (Beta Phi Mu) from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, a master of arts degree in history from Brown University, and a bachelor of arts degree in history (with highest honors) from Williams College.
The College’s Department of Computer Science (CS) also welcomes Marcello Balduccini, PhD and Gaurav Naik in their new roles as CS faculty. Balduccini's fundamental research interests are focused on knowledge representation and reasoning, including ontologies, agent architectures, commonsense, natural language understanding, and constraint satisfaction. Naik’s research interests include computer network security, and the research and development of next generation Internet architectures and services.