Boston University Prof. Evimaria Terzi, assistant professor of computer science in the College of Arts & Sciences, has been awarded a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship grant. Terzi and six other promising young researchers from around the world will share in a total grant distribution of $1.4 million.
The Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship program provides an unrestricted cash gift of $200,000 each to innovative new faculty members who are exploring breakthrough, high-impact research that has the potential to help solve challenging societal problems. Each fellow can use the grant at his or her discretion.
Terzi’s interests include the use of algorithms to extract useful data from large sets of information. Her research interests are in the area of algorithmic data mining with emphasis on social-network analysis, analysis of sequential data, ranking, clustering and bioinformatics.
Terzi joined BU’s Computer Science Department in September 2009. Earlier she was a research staff member at IBM’s Almaden Research Center and a post-doctoral researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. She had earned a bachelor’s degree from The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), a master’s from Purdue University, and a PhD from University of Helsinki (Finland), all in computer science.
“Evimaria works on the analysis and mining of large datasets, and in a very short time she has become one of the world’s leading experts on the analysis and mining of large sequence datasets,” says Prof. Stanley Schlaroff, professor and chair of the Computer Science Department. “Despite the early stage of her career, she is already an authority in a number of important areas, and her current work shows great promise for the future.”
The Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship Program identifies, recognizes, and supports exceptional new faculty members engaged in innovative computing research. The objective is to stimulate and support creative research undertaken by promising researchers who have the potential to make a profound impact on the field of computing in their research disciplines.
Fellows also have access to other Microsoft resources, such as software, conference invitations, and engagements with Microsoft Research. The program provides recipients considerable freedom in planning their academic research, including interdisciplinary research, scientific computing, bioinformatics, computational biology, software engineering, and other areas where computing transforms the discipline and advances the state of the art.
Founded in 1839, Boston University is an internationally private research university with more than 30,000 students participating in undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs. BU consists of 17 colleges and schools along with a number of multi-disciplinary centers and institutes which are central to the school’s research and teaching mission.
To learn more about the Faculty Fellows program, visit: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/awards/msrff.aspx