Administrative Committee
Ajay Anand
Ajay Anand is a professor of data science and serves as the deputy director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence where he is responsible for managing the data science education program and identifying opportunities for expanding curriculum offerings. Ajay also leads the data science capstone and practicum courses working with external industry and non-profit organizations.
Ajay has more than 12 years’ experience at Carestream Health and Philips Research, working as a senior research scientist and technical project leader in the area of medical ultrasound and biomedical signal processing. He is a co-inventor on more than 40 patents and applications, and has co-authored more than 35 journal articles and conference proceedings. His technical interests are in time-series analysis, physical model-based predictive analysis, and biomedical data analytics.
Ajay earned his PhD and MS in Electrical Engineering from University of Washington, and an MS in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Texas.
Mujdat Cetin
Mujdat Cetin is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and the Robin and Tim Wentworth Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Rochester. He is also serving as the Director of the New York State Center of Excellence in Data Science. Previously he served as a faculty member at Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey, and as a Research Scientist at MIT. He also held visiting faculty positions at MIT, Northeastern University, and Boston University.
Dr. Cetin received his BS in electrical engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in 1993, an MS in electrical engineering from the University of Salford, Manchester UK in 1995, and a PhD in electrical engineering from Boston University, Boston, MA in 2001.
Dr. Cetin has received several awards, including the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, the EURASIP/Elsevier Signal Processing Best Paper Award, the IET Radar, Sonar and Navigation Premium Award, and the Turkish Academy of Sciences Distinguished Young Scientist Award.
Dr. Cetin is a Fellow of the IEEE and served as a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Directions Board and as the Chair of the IEEE Computational Imaging Technical Committee. He is currently a Senior Area Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging and the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. He is also Associate Editor for the SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences.
Stephen Dewhurst
Stephen Dewhurst is vice president for research at the University of Rochester, dean's professor, and chair of the microbiology and immunology department. He has been a member of the University’s faculty since 1990, and served as senior associate dean for basic research at SMD from 2007 to 2009. He is a molecular virologist, with more than 20 years of experience in HIV/AIDS research. He also founded and directs the the UR’s NIH-funded Rochester Partnership for Research and Academic Career Training of Deaf Postdoctoral Scholars. He has extensive experience with graduate teaching and mentoring, and received the University’s William H. Riker Award for Graduate Education in 2008.
Chen Ding
Chen Ding is the chair of the Department of Computer Science and the recipient of a DOE Early Career Principal Investigator award and an NSF CAREER award. He joined URCS in July, 2000, after receiving his PhD at Rice University. His research is in program analysis and optimization, including computational and mathematical models of locality and parallelism and automatic and suggestion-based techniques for locality optimization, memory management and program parallelization. He is widely known for his work on reuse distance to formally characterize locality and optimize data movement in the memory hierarchy of modern computer systems.
Wendi Heinzelman
Wendi Heinzelman is dean of the Edmund A. Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Rochester, where she is also a full professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science. She received a BS degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University and MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. Her research interests include wireless communications and networking, mobile-cloud computing and multimedia communication. She has contributed to 12 books and has published in more than 150 journals and conferences, with over 55,000 citations to her work. She is an elected Member-at-Large of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc), a member of the Executive Committee of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Engineering Deans Council, co-founder and a steering committee member of N^2 Women, a Fellow of the ACM, and a Fellow of the IEEE.
Christopher Kanan
Christopher Kanan is a tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, where he lead the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences’ AI Initiative. He hold secondary appointments in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, The Goergen Institute for Data Science and AI (GIDS-AI), and The Center for Visual Science.
With over 20 years of experience in artificial intelligence, Dr. Kanan’s research focuses on developing deep learning systems that advance the foundational capabilities necessary for artificial general intelligence (AGI). His work spans deep continual learning, multi-modal scene understanding, visual question answering, self-supervised learning, medical computer vision (pathology and radiology), semantic segmentation, object recognition, active vision, object tracking, and more. He also brings a strong background in cognitive science, primate vision, theoretical neuroscience, and eye tracking.
From 2018 to 2022, Dr. Kanan served as an executive leader at Paige.AI, where he spearheaded AI research that led to Paige Prostate—the first FDA-cleared AI system in pathology. He played a key role in scaling Paige from a small start-up to a company with over 180 employees and led its patent initiative, earning 60+ granted patents. He continues to contribute as a member of Paige’s Scientific Advisory Board.
Previously, he was a tenured Associate Professor in the Carlson Center for Imaging Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). At RIT, he co-founded the Center for Human-aware AI (CHAI), and he served as its Associate Director for four years. he was also a member of RIT’s McNair Scholars Advisory Board, part of RIT’s Division of Diversity and Inclusion. From 2019 – 2022, he was a visiting professor at Cornell Tech in New York City, where he taught a course on Deep Learning for four years to about 100 graduate students annually.
Dr. Kanan received his PhD from UC San Diego (UCSD), was a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, and worked as a scientist at NASA JPL.
Gonzalo Mateos
Gonzalo Mateos joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an assistant professor in September 2014. He is also a member of the Institute for Data Science and has a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science.
Gonzalo Mateos was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1982. He earned the B.Sc. degree from Universidad de la Republica, Uruguay, in 2005, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 2009 and 2011, all in electrical engineering. He joined the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, in 2014, where he is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as a member of the Goergen Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science. During the 2013 academic year, he was a visiting scholar with the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. From 2004 to 2006, he worked as a Systems Engineer at Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), Uruguay.
His research interests lie in the areas of statistical learning from Big Data, network science, decentralized optimization, and graph signal processing, with applications in dynamic network health monitoring, social, power grid, and Big Data analytics. He currently serves as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, the IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks, and is a member of the IEEE SigPort Editorial Board. Dr. Mateos received the NSF CAREER Award in 2018, the 2017 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award (as senior co-author), and the Best Paper Awards at ICASSP 2018, SSP Workshop 2016, and SPAWC 2012. His doctoral work has been recognized with the 2013 University of Minnesota's Best Dissertation Award (Honorable Mention) across all Physical Sciences and Engineering areas.
Samuel Thomas
Samuel (Sam) William Thomas III ‘00 is the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences and professor of chemistry. Thomas began his role as dean on January 1, 2026. An experienced leader, he previously served as senior dean of academic affairs and professor of chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, supporting departments and programs across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
Thomas’s research and scholarship apply principles of physical organic chemistry to develop stimuli-responsive organic materials with impacts in organic electronics and photodynamic therapy. His research group’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy.
He has received major awards including the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award, and the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award. Thomas has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers, and holds eight patents and patent applications. He has supervised 12 successful PhD student defenses from his laboratory and has taught organic chemistry courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Thomas earned a bachelor of science in chemistry from the University of Rochester in 2000 and a PhD in chemistry from MIT in 2006. He completed postdoctoral work as an American Cancer Society Fellow at Harvard University.
John Tarduno
John A. Tarduno is dean of research for the School of Arts and Sciences/Hajim School and a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences where he also holds a dual appointment as a professor of physics and astronomy. His research centers on the application of paleomagnetism to problems in geodynamics, geomagnetism and environmental change.
He received a BS degree in geophysics from Lehigh University (1983) and an MS and PhD in geophysics from Stanford University (1987). After postdoctoral work at Stanford and ETH-Zurich, he was Assistant Research Geophysicist with Scripps Institution of Oceanography (1990-1993). He joined the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Rochester in 1993, where he founded the paleomagnetism laboratory. He has served as co-chief scientist on an ocean drilling cruise in the Pacific Ocean, and led field research in Australia, Botswana, India, Japan, Lesotho, New Zealand, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe. He has also led scientific expeditions to the High Canadian Arctic and the Sahara.
John is the recipient of numerous honours, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, election as Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for "providing large-impact contributions to the study of Earth's paleomagnetic record and for a matching mentoring outreach to students in this geophysical discipline." Most recently, he was awarded the Price Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, for investigations of outstanding merit in solid-earth geophysics, oceanography, or planetary sciences, and the Petrus Peregrinus Medal of the European Geosciences Union.
He is also an avid cyclist, participating in local centuries and duathlons. He also enjoys trail running and snowshoe racing.
