Wellesley CS is delighted to welcome three new faculty members to the department for Fall 2017.

Assistant Professor Ada Lerner studies computer security and privacy, especially in interaction with social systems, the law, and human needs.  They combine low-level measurement studies and systems building projects with high-level human subjects work in order to design and build tools that solve human problems, with an eye especially for needs of underprivileged groups. Ada’s recent work explored the security and privacy needs of journalists building and evaluating Confidante, a usable encrypted email system.  Ada joins us from the University of Washington in Seattle, where they recently received their PhD.  Ada is teaching CS 230 this fall. Come introduce yourself to Ada in SCI E120!

Assistant Professor Catherine Grevet Delcourt ’09 prototypes social systems to study how people relate to each other through social technologies.  She uses the lenses of human-computer interaction and social computing to develop novel prototyping methods for social systems research and to explore the role of social media in political polarization, identity and anonymity in online conversations, personal information management, and personal informatics.  Catherine, a Wellesley alum, returns to join us via PhD work at Georgia Tech and research on social systems at Yik Yak.  She is teaching CS 115 this fall. Stop by to meet Catherine in SCI E104!

Hess Fellow Cibele Freire is a theoretical computer scientist whose research focuses on computational complexity and the theoretical foundations of databases. Her recent work has characterized several classes of database queries with respect to the notion of “resilience” — quantifying the minimal database changes required to cause a query to return different results. Cibele’s work has applications in efficiently updating database views and in explaining query results.  Cibele joins us from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she conducted her PhD work.  She is teaching CS 235 this fall.  Come meet Cibele in SCI S160!

Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Ada, Catherine, and Cibele!