Lisa Wobbes Joins CDS as a Clinical Assistant Professor

Lisa Wobbes will join the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences as a clinical assistant professor, starting August 2023. Her responsibilities involve teaching foundational and core courses  as well as developing and teaching new upper-elective on topics in data science such as machine learning for graph analysis.  

"It is wonderful to see data scientists of Lisa’s caliber join CDS and bring her training as an applied mathematician to bear on our curriculum," said Azer Bestavros, Associate Provost for  Computing & Data Sciences. "Her skills developing and applying data science methods in educational settings and her industry experience working on fluid dynamics simulations will go a long way in bringing the real-world into our classrooms."

Wobbes received her PhD in applied mathematics from Delft University of Technology in 2019. The focus of her doctoral work was on fundamental improvements to a numerical modeling method known as the material point method. In addition to her PhD research, Wobbes taught courses and supervised projects at the master’s level.

"My main experience with data science comes from my work at the Dutch Executive Agency for Education where I used traditional data-science techniques. However, recently I’ve become more interested in various deep learning applications," she said. "I’m particularly interested in neural networks for image recognition, graph analysis (graph neural networks), and natural language processing."

In addition to her PhD research, Wobbes taught courses and supervised projects at the master’s level.

After her PhD, Wobbes worked as a data scientist at the Dutch Executive Agency for Education in the Hague. "My main experience with data science comes from my work at the Dutch Executive Agency for Education where I used traditional data-science techniques. However, recently I’ve become more interested in various deep learning applications," she said. "I’m particularly interested in neural networks for image recognition, graph analysis (graph neural networks), and natural language processing."

Notably, Wobbes provided quantitative support for a policy introduced by the former Dutch Minister for Primary and Secondary Education, Arie Slob, by investigating the prior professional backgrounds of people who later changed careers to become educators. "For that project I made extensive use of the data from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science as well as Statistics Netherlands, the national statistical service of the Netherlands," Wobbes said.

Prior to joining BU, Wobbes, who is fluent in Russian and Dutch, worked as a research engineer at a small consulting/engineering company, where she closely collaborated with researchers from Brown, Rice, and Waseda universities. Her work included building cutting-edge simulations for modal analysis and fluid dynamics. Lisa also created video tutorials to improve the accessibility of the simulation approach.

"I am very excited to join CDS because I truly enjoy working in an academic setting," Wobbes said. "I’m especially excited to collaborate with multidisciplinary groups of professors. I am also looking forward to expanding my teaching experience and sharing my interest in the mathematical aspects of data science."