CS@Georgetown Newsletter | Summer 2025
Posted in Newsletters
Chair’s Message
Dear Students, Alumni, and Colleagues,
It is amazing how quickly time flies. My first year as the Chair of the Department of Computer Science has come to an end. Because of the amazing people I am surrounded by, there is a lot of exciting news to share. Below you will find some of the ways our community shined and grew this past year – a small glimpse into things that are happening in the department.
I also want to take a moment to give a shout out to our former department administrator, Djuana Shields (DJ), who retired in the fall. She was a hidden gem who kept our department moving forward for over five years and served Georgetown for more than 20 years. She always had a smile on her face and worked hard to help the faculty and students in the department. We wish her the best of luck as she begins her next chapter. Our new administrative team has jumped in, figuring everything out and restructuring processes to accommodate our constantly changing needs. I thank everyone who helps our department run smoothly.
As most of you know, a few years ago we began our CS and Ethics major. I believe it is the first in the country. Other universities have added a course or two while we have worked to embed ethics throughout our program. This year we hired a senior faculty member to increase our leadership in that space – Professor Tadayoshi Kohno. He will join us in the fall as the new McDevitt Chair of Computer Science, Ethics and Society.
Of course, as excited as I am about what we have accomplished, it is just as important for our department to identify avenues for growth. For example, we are in a moment in which the rapid advancements in generative AI compel us to further reimagine what computer science education should look like. How do we educate and inspire a new generation of computer scientists who not only understand algorithmic thinking, but who also know how to contextualize their knowledge within the complex landscape of technology and society? While we continue to advance our current research, what are the new fundamental questions in computer science that need addressing? What are the critical cross-disciplinary problems we can and should work on? How will our CS community meet the moment? I am excited to think about all these questions and many others as we continue to innovate in our department.
As you will see below, our faculty and students have been working on not only advancing research, teaching, and engagement across computer science and beyond, but also innovating in new ways. I hope we can continue to foster a culture of deep intellectual thought, curiosity and debate, and a welcoming community for everyone.
I feel blessed to be in this department and look forward to continuing to help our department blossom.
Lisa
Department Chair, Computer Science
Students
Increasing Student Diversity
We continue to increase our department diversity and were recently ranked the second best university for women in computer science by the Washington Monthly. At the undergraduate level, 40-45% of our majors are women, a statistic that significantly exceeds the national average. This recognition highlights our commitment to fostering an inclusive environment in the field.
Student Engagement
Undergraduate and Master’s students continue to work with faculty on research projects through faculty grant awards, the Georgetown University Research Opportunities Program (GUROP), the Fritz Fellowship Program, the MDI Scholars Program, and the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program.
To support students who may need extra help beyond TA support for a course, we have piloted a new tutoring program for undergraduate students. Sam King, PhD student, has helped develop and run this program. His team of tutors help students having difficulty with different concepts and offer review sessions where they work through problems related to specific topics.
Our students continue to engage with each other and the broader community in so many ways. HoyaHacks (in its 11th year) continues to bring a range of students from across the country to Georgetown. This year was one of the largest turnouts with over 250 students attending from over 40 colleges and universities. Once again, we had an amazing group of students and faculty who helped make sure the event was a success and alumni who sponsored tracks and/or helped with the judging.
Department Awards
Reed Uhlik received the Computer Science Award which is presented to the graduating senior pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science who has demonstrated outstanding potential and promise in the field. The CS Award was presented at the College of Arts and Sciences 106th Tropaia ceremony. Reed also graduated with Computer Science honors.
Eight students—Pasha Abrishamchian, Amro Abdalla, Sam King, Abhishek Purushothama, Sidhant Saraogi, Reed Uhlik, Boxiao (Blake) Wang, Shihao Wang—won the Department’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for the 2024-25 academic year. The Award recognizes exemplary TAs who have significantly enhanced the learning experience of students through their dedication and expertise.
Adeline Roza won the computer science t-shirt design contest.
Graduations
Congratulations to all of our undergraduate and graduate students who graduated this year. A special shout out to our PhD graduates: Hrishikesh Kulkarni, Zhao Zhang, Yanchen Wang, Shuo Liu, Laasya Bangalore, Shabnam Behzad, and Michael Kranzlein.
Faculty
Faculty Promotions
Congratulations to our faculty who were promoted this year.
Prof. Jeremy Fineman and Prof. Cal Newport were promoted to the rank of Full Professor.
Prof. Philip Buffum and Prof. Ray Essick were promoted to the rank of Associate Teaching Professor.
Faculty Honors
Professor Clay Shields received the College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. It is awarded to one CAS professor each year for outstanding achievement in the teaching of undergraduate students.
Professor Micah Sherr received the College of Arts and Sciences Farr Faculty Excellence Award. This award honors excellent faculty research, effective mentoring of student research and/or innovative dissemination of scientific knowledge in the sciences.
Prof. Elissa M. Redmiles received the Outstanding Early-Career Researcher Award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC). The award recognizes her groundbreaking contributions to socio-technical security research.
New External Grants
I want to congratulate our faculty who brought in external awards this year: Prof. Sarah Bargal, Prof. Kobbi Nissim, Prof. Elissa Redmiles, Prof. Lisa Singh, Prof. Ben Ujcich, and Prof. Grace Yang.
Noteworthy Honors
Ryan Wails and Prof. Micah Sherr received the Best Practical Award at the 2024 Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI ’24) program at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) for their paper “On Precisely Detecting Censorship Circumvention in Real-World Networks” (with George Arnold Sullivan and Rob Jansen), which was previously presented at the 2024 Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium.
Sharing Expertise
We also saw our faculty bring their academic expertise to national issues:
- Prof. Matt Blaze, a leading expert in cryptography and secure systems, testified before the House Oversight Committee warning that outdated surveillance laws have created critical vulnerabilities and called for urgent reforms.
- Prof. Nathan Schneider co-authored an amicus brief with GU postdoctoral fellow Brandon Waldon and GU law professor Kevin Tobia that was cited in the majority opinion of a Supreme Court case on gun regulation.
- Prof. Lisa Singh partnered with the University of Michigan, CNN, SSRS and Verasight to monitor public opinion about the presidential election.
- Prof. Elissa M. Redmiles spoke on a National Academies Panel about Predictive Policing.
Other Highlights
Welcome to our new administrative team: Maria, Venus and Mari. We are thrilled to have them join the department. Mari started in the fall and Maria and Venus in the spring.
This past October, to showcase the exceptional academic research achievements of our faculty members, we held our inaugural CS Faculty Spotlight lecture with Prof. Jeremy Fineman, who presented “Beating Bellman-Ford: Faster Single-Source Shortest Paths with Negative Weights.” The talk was based on the 2023 ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) best paper.
Prof. Ophir Frieder presented the spring CS Faculty Spotlight lecture, “Digitized Health,” in March. He presented work that is part of a series of academic publications and patents.
Prof. Elissa Redmiles in collaboration with students and faculty from the Department of Art and Art History and the Law Center, co-directed the A.I. in Art: Perceptions, Values, & Rights Exhibition, an experimental research exhibition that investigates the perceptions on AI-generated art from emerging artists, regulators, AI model developers, and future users of AI systems. It featured selected works from over 150 submissions of AI-involved artwork. The art is on display in Lau until October.
In February, Prof. Micah Sherr organized the DC-Area Anonymity, Privacy, and Security Seminar (DCAPS) seminar for researchers in the D.C. area to share their work on computer and communications anonymity, privacy, and security.
Prof. Nathan Schneider and colleagues in the Linguistics department and Law school organized SOLID | The 2025 Symposium on Legal Interpretation and Data. This symposium brought together scholars of law, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science to discuss new empirical approaches to questions in legal interpretation.
With the Center for Digital Ethics, the department jointly hosted five Distinguished Lectures at the intersection of computer science, technology, and ethics during the spring. The topics ranged from fighting internet censorship to translating values to sociotechnical systems to computer security trolley problems to generative AI and safety critical systems to usable, human-centered design.
We continued many of our longstanding traditions, including the 25th and 26th Semi-Annual GU-CS Graduate Research Presentation Days, the CS Club Fair bagel brunch, CS Career Day and Alumni Happy Hour, weekly Tea Times for faculty and graduate students, weekly CS Colloquiums, our CS Picnic, and our CS graduation celebrations for seniors and graduate students.
