Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Computer Science (CS) welcomes five new faculty members this year. Professor Vivek Sarkar and Assistant Professor Jacob Abernethy arrived for the fall semester. Associate Professor Vladimir Kolesnikov and Assistant Professors Jamie Morgenstern and Xu Chu will be joining in the spring.

“Our new faculty bring a breadth of strengths that help us process, secure, and understand data, from machine learning to cryptography to databases to high-performance computing,” CS Chair Lance Fortnow said. “They cement our position as one of the top departments that power the future of computation.”

Meet the newest Yellow Jackets:

Vivek Sarkar comes on as a distinguished chair in Stephen Fleming Chair for Telecommunications. His research focuses on almost every influential aspect of parallel software today, including programming languages, program analysis, compiler optimizations, and runtime systems for diverse parallel platforms. He joins us from Rice University and was an IBM Senior Manager of Programming Technologies prior to that. Sarkar has been serving as a member of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) since 2009 and has been on CRA’s Board of Directors since 2015. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University.

 Jacob (Jake) Abernethy studies machine learning and how it connects to optimization, economics, and statistics. Coming to us from the University of Michigan, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. from University of California Berkeley.

Jamie Morgenstern’s research focuses on the intersection of machine learning and economics, from algorithmic game theory to privacy. She will arrive from a postdoctoral fellowship at the Warren Center in Computer Science and Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Vladimir Kolesnikov studies cryptography. Prior to joining Tech, he has been a security researcher at Bell Labs. He received his Ph.D. from University of Toronto.

Xu Chu joins us as an assistant professor right out of the Ph.D. program at the University of Waterloo. He’s interested in all forms of data management, from information extraction to data matching.