MENU CSE welcomes new faculty of 2024-25
CSE welcomes nine new faculty to campus this academic year, joining us from institutions across the country and bringing a wealth of experience and expertise to U-M. Spanning areas from computer architecture to artificial intelligence to data science, these new faculty will contribute to Michigan’s continued excellence in research and teaching.
Please join us in welcoming the following new faculty members to CSE.
Faculty starting in Fall 2024
Nathaniel Bleier
Assistant Professor
PhD, Computer Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Nathaniel “Nate” Bleier specializes in computer systems and architecture, with a focus on system-level design automation and high-yield, flexible microprocessors. His work in this area has been recognized with several awards, including the UIUC Min Wang and Pi-Yu Chung Endowed Research Award, the Lieutenant General Thomas M. Rienzi Graduate Award, inclusion in a ISCA-50 Retrospective on influential research in computer architecture, an IEEE MICRO Top Picks honorable mention, and more. A dedicated educator, Bleier has focused on supporting veterans in higher education through the Warrior Scholar Project. He also teaches and mentors incarcerated men through the Education Justice Project.
Scott Dexter
Lecturer III
PhD, Computer Science and Engineering
University of Michigan
A CSE PhD alum, Scott Dexter is returning to U-M after serving as a professor of computer science at Alma College since 2019. Before that, he taught computer science at Brooklyn College for more than 20 years. As a scholar and teacher, he is most interested in the relationships between culture and access to technology. He has co-authored a Java textbook, a book about the philosophy of open-source software, and over 30 peer-reviewed papers in collaboration with scholars from across numerous disciplines.
Krisztián Flautner
Professor of Engineering Practice
PhD, Computer Science and Engineering
University of Michigan
Krisztián Flautner is a noted expert in computer architecture, with his research focusing on the design of high-performance, low-power processing platforms. Most recently, he was responsible for product strategy in Cisco’s Emerging Technology & Incubation Group after being CEO of Banzai Cloud, a startup acquired by Cisco that turned Cloud Native dreams into enterprise reality through cloud software. Previously, he was general manager of the Internet of Things business unit and VP of research and development at ARM. Flautner has co-authored over 80 publications and received several best paper awards, the 2017 ISCA influential paper award for groundbreaking research in power-efficient computing, and the 2021 MICRO Test of Time award.
Farnaz Jahanbakhsh
Assistant Professor
PhD, Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Originally hired in 2023, Farnaz Jahanbakhsh comes to CSE from Stanford University, where she has been working as a postdoc with the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Institute. Her research interests are in human-computer interaction and social computing, where she aims to empower end users through reimagined social media and web systems, which she builds and tests through field studies. Her work has been broadly published in premier venues, such as ACM CHI and CSCW. Before completing her PhD at MIT CSAIL, Jahanbakhsh earned a master’s in computer science at UIUC.
Suraj Rampure
Lecturer III
MS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
University of California, Berkeley
Prior to joining CSE, Suraj Rampure worked as a Lecturer in the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego for three years. An adept and passionate educator, he teaches undergraduate courses in programming, statistical inference, and machine learning. While at UCSD, he also coordinated the senior data science capstone program and was recognized with a campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award in 2024. Rampure holds BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley, where he received several teaching awards. This fall at U-M, he will be teaching a new class on practical data science and will chair the undergraduate data science program committee.
Amrita Roy Chowdhury
Assistant Professor
PhD, Computer Science
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Amrita Roy Chowdhury comes to CSE with an extensive background in cryptography, differential privacy, and machine learning. Her research focuses on developing safe data analytics solutions that are both provably private and practical for real-world use. She has published extensively on this topic in premier venues, such as CCS, IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, ICML, and others. She has been named a Rising Star by UC Berkeley, MIT, and University of Chicago for her outstanding contributions to the field. Roy Chowdhury comes to U-M from UC San Diego, where she was a postdoc through the CCC/CRA CI Fellowship.
Ke Wu
Assistant Professor
PhD, Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
The latest member of the Theory of Computation Lab at U-M, Ke Wu’s research combines cryptography and game theory, as well as related areas in theoretical computer science, to model incentives in decentralized environments. Her work has been published in a number of prestigious venues, including Crypto, Eurocrypt, and others. Wu recently completed her PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, and she holds a master’s in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.
Faculty starting in Winter 2025
Muhammad Shahbaz
Assistant Professor
PhD, Computer Science
Princeton University
Muhammad Shahbaz comes to CSE from Purdue University, where he was the Kevin C. and Suzanne L. Khan New Frontiers Assistant Professor in Computer Science. His research focuses on the development of domain-specific abstractions, compilers, and architectures for emerging workloads in machine learning, cloud computing, and more. Before joining Purdue, he worked as a postdoc at Stanford University and as a Research Assistant at Georgia Tech and the University of Cambridge. He has received numerous awards for his outstanding research, including the NSF CAREER Award; Facebook, Google, and Intel Research Awards; the IETF/IRTF ANRP Prize; the ACM SOSR Systems Award; an IEEE Micro Top Pick honorable mention; and more.
Ke Sun
Assistant Professor
PhD, Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego
Ke Sun’s expertise lies in the design of intelligent mobile, wearable, and IoT systems that are cost-effective, human-centric, and trustworthy, with applications in HCI, mobile health, environmental monitoring, robotics, and beyond. His research has been published in top venues, including MobiCom, MobiSys, NDSS, and others, and recognized with several awards, including an ACM IMWUT Distinguished Paper Award. He was also awarded the Google PhD Fellowship in Mobile Computing in 2023.
