Four New Faculty Join CSE

Meet the new arrivals.
photo of four new faculty Enlarge

Roya Ensafi – Research Assistant Professor

PhD, Computer Science, 2014
University of New Mexico

Roya’s research is in the area of security and privacy. Much of her work has focused on designing techniques to detect and defend against adversaries who manipulate Internet traffic in order to block, monitor, or tamper with users’ online activities. Her PhD dissertation presented a significant new technique to measure Internet filtering from thousands of Internet vantage points. She is a recipient of the 2016 Applied Networking Research Prize from the Internet Research Task Force for her paper entitled “Examining How the Great Firewall Discovers Hidden Circumvention Servers.” Roya joins EECS from Princeton University, where she was a postdoctoral researcher. She joined CSE in September 2017.

Emily Graetz – Lecturer

MSE, Computer Science and Engineering, 2016, and MA, Mathematics, 2017
University of Michigan

Emily has taught EECS students since Fall 2013, first as a Graduate Student Instructor and more recently as an Intermittent Lecturer in EECS 203. As a GSI, she was selected for a Yahoo! Teaching Award in recognition of the high ratings she received from her students in EECS 280 and EECS 475. She is a passionate lifelong educator, having taught as a K-12 tutor and teacher in the past. She joined CSE as a lecturer in September 2017.

Nicole Hamilton – Lecturer

MS, Electrical Engineering, 1973 Stanford University

Nicole has over 40 years’ experience in software, including 30 years as an entrepreneur. She is the sole author of the Hamilton C shell, and she was the ninth member of the team at Microsoft that created the Bing search engine, for which she wrote the query language and ranker for its first release. She is a life senior member of the IEEE, and has 10 issued patents and numerous publications, including a paper on search engine ranking that received a 10-year “test of time” award at the 2015 International Conference on Machine Learning. Today, Nicole approaches her teaching as an entrepreneur, with an emphasis on innovating to enable all of her students to succeed. Nicole joins EECS from the University of Washington Bothell, where she has been a lecturer in electrical engineering. She joined CSE in September 2017.

Westley Weimer – Professor

PhD, Computer Science, 2005 University of California, Berkeley

Westley’s primary research interest is advancing software quality through both static and dynamic programming language approaches. He is particularly concerned with automatic or minimally-guided techniques that can scale and be applied easily to large, existing programs. He also works to help programmers address defects, understand programs, and program correctly. His research spans automated program repair, formal verification, program improvement, human studies, and language feature design. Westley joins EECS from the University of Virginia, where he was an associate professor. His work has led to over 8,400 citations, eight distinguished paper awards, four multi-conference research awards, and one ten-year most influential paper award. He joined CSE in September 2017.