Chair's Message

Dear CSE Students, Alumni, Friends and Colleagues,

Dr. Wei Zhang

The university has returned to in-person and asynchronous online courses. As the COVID-19 cases in our region were slowing down in Spring 2022, we have seen an increasing number of in-person activities that bring the hope of transitioning to normalcy. As the CSE Chair, I was happy to welcome both our BA CS freshmen and BS CSE sophomores in person in different classes. Besides learning in classrooms and/or online, CSE students have also been increasingly involved in in- person curricular and extracurricular activities such as the Capstone Showcase, the ACM student programming contests, and the cyber defense competitions. The CSE Department has also held F2F faculty meeting and retreat events in Spring 2022 while offering an online option for remote participation.

The BA CS program was officially launched in Fall 2021. There are already more than 40 students in this program. CSE faculty have kept receiving new grants from both the federal agencies and industry in AY 21-22. Besides awards received from the National Institute of Health, the National Security Agency, and DRAPA, several CSE faculty have worked on industry projects funded by local and regional companies such as LGE and KU Services, GoodMaps Inc, and QinetiQ Inc.

CSE undergraduate and graduate students have won distinguished awards in UofL and beyond. Christopher Trombley, a CSE junior with a double major in mathematics won the 2022 Barry Goldwater scholarship, making him one of the 10 UofL recipients who have ever won the award established in 1986 in honor of former U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater. Heba Elsayed Mohamed Kandil, a CSE Ph.D. student, has won the John M. Houchens Prize for Outstanding Dissertation for May 2022. In addition, 18 CSE students have won a variety of awards in our annual award ceremony. We are very proud of all their achievements.