UCSB CE and CS Undergraduate Advising, Winter 2026.

Jonathan Balkind Jonathan Balkind is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UCSB. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University. His research interests lie at the intersection of Computer Architecture, Programming Languages, and Operating Systems. He is the Lead Architect of OpenPiton and its heterogeneous-ISA descendent, BYOC, which are productive research platforms with thousands of downloads from over 70 countries worldwide. Email: jbalkind at ucsb.edu		Tim Sherwood Tim Sherwood is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Dean of the College of Creative Studies. Professor Sherwood joined the CS Department in 2003. He is a co-founder of Tortuga Logic. Professor Sherwood works on all manner of computer science and engineering problems from the perspective of how to better "shape" computers to address our needs (e.g. to be more secure or amenable to machine learning). Email: sherwood at cs.ucsb.edu
Richert Wang Richert Wang is a joint Associate Teaching Professor between the Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Computing in the College of Creative Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine in 2011. Professor Wang works on computer science pedagogy topics including interdisciplinary approaches to teach applications of computer science to students with various backgrounds. Professor Wang is the current faculty advisor for UCSB's Game Development Club. Email: richert at cs.ucsb.edu		Michael Beyeler Dr. Michael Beyeler directs the Bionic Vision Lab at UC Santa Barbara. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Irvine and holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Before joining UCSB in 2019, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington, where his work on computational models of bionic vision laid the foundation for the research now pursued in his lab. Dr. Beyeler also serves as Associate Director of the UCSB Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior (ReCVEB) and has received several prestigious awards, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award and the DP2 New Innovator Award. Most recently, he was honored with the Harold J. Plous Memorial Award 2024-25 in recognition of his outstanding contributions to UC Santa Barbara's intellectual life through research, teaching, and service. Email: mbeyeler at ucsb.edu
Maryam Majedi Dr. Maryam Majedi joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as an Assistant Teaching Professor in 2023. Dr. Majedi's research primarily revolves around Embedded Ethics and Data Privacy. She explores the intersection of computer science and ethical considerations, aiming to develop modules that facilitate the integration of ethics and data privacy principles into computer science education. Email: majedi at ucsb.edu		Ziad Matni Ziad Matni is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Computer Science. He received his PhD in Information Science from Rutgers University, where he also taught as an adjunct faculty member before joining UCSB. Before his work in academia, he held multiple engineering and management positions in the semiconductor, computer systems, and data communication industry for over a decade. He engages in research in CS education, computational social science, and in data & information science. Email: zmatni at ucsb.edu

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Nabeel Nasir Dr. Nabeel Nasir is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Virginia in 2024. Before his PhD, he worked as an Android Developer at Adobe for the Lightroom and Photoshop Mix teams. He also worked as a Software Developer for an IoT startup, EnLite Research, developing solutions to reduce energy consumption in office spaces. He is passionate about teaching and broadening participation in Computer Science, and supporting undergraduate research in Cyber Physical Systems and CS Education. Email: nabeeln at ucsb.edu		Amr El Abbadi Amr El Abbadi is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Professor El Abbadi joined the Department in 1987. His Ph.D. is from Cornell University. His research interests include: Fault-tolerant distributed systems; Distributed Databases, Operating Systems, Cloud, and Social Networks. He is also the faculty advisor for the class of 2019. Office: HFH 3115 Email: amr at cs.ucsb.edu
Yogananda Isukapalli Yogananda Isukapalli is a Teaching Professor in the ECE department. He joined the department in 2017 and has several years of experience as a staff scientist in the Wi-Fi division at Broadcom. He runs the CE Capstone program, offering students real-world experience in developing embedded systems that have significant hardware, software, and in some cases, mechanical components. Email: yoga at ucsb.edu		Dmitri Strukov Dmitri Strukov is a Professor and Distinguished Lecturer in the ECE department at UCSB. He directs the Strukov Research Group, which aims to develop novel computation methods. He pursues highly interdisciplinary research, which spans material science, electrical engineering, and computer science. Email: strukov at ece.ucsb.edu
Diba Mirza Diba Mirza is a Teaching Professor in the Department of Computer Science. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the UC San Diego and joined the Computer Science department at UCSB in 2017. She worked as a post-doc on interdiscplinary projects in the department of Computer Science and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, where she developed underwater robotic swarms that can help scientists learn more about the ocean. She directs the Early Research Scholars Program (ERSP) which is designed to support students in their first research experience and co-directs the CS Undergraduate Learning Assistant Program. Email: dimirza at cs.ucsb.edu		Kaustav Banerjee Banerjee is one of the world's leading innovators in the field of nanoelectronics. His current research focuses on the physics, technology, and applications of two-dimensional (2D) materials, such as graphene, for designing next-generation energy-efficient electronics, photonics, and bioelectronics. His pioneering contributions to nanoscale interconnect design and their energy-efficient solutions, particularly 3D integrated circuits, have been widely adopted and commercialized by the IC industry. His pathbreaking innovations with 2D van der Waals materials and heterostructures are setting the stage for next-generation electronics. This includes the invention of the Kinetic Inductor that overcame a 200-year old Faraday-limit of the inductance density of conventional materials. Email: kaustav at ece.ucsb.edu

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Ambuj Singh

Ambuj Singh is a Professor of Computer Science and Biomolecular Science and Engineering. His undergraduate education was at IIT in India. He joined UCSB's computer science department immediately after his PhD. He has written over 180 technical papers in the areas of distributed computing, databases, and bioinformatics. He has worked with numerous students and graduated over 20 PhD and 10 MS students. His students have obtained positions in major research labs as well as domestic and international universities.

Email: ambuj at ucsb.edu

Rich Wolski

Rich Wolski is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems Inc. Professor Wolski joined the department in 2001. His Ph.D. degree is from the University of California at Davis. Professor Wolski has led several national scale research efforts in the area of distributed systems and is the progenitor of the Eucalyptus open source cloud project. His research explore ways in which the ubiquitous proliferation of high-performance network connectivity can be used to foster new distributed computing capabilities and systems.

Email: rich at cs.ucsb.edu

Tao Yang

Dr. Tao Yang is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Yang joined the Department of Computer Science at UCSB in 1993. His research has been in the areas of parallel and distributed systems, web search/mining, and high performance computing with over 100 refereed papers and patents. His recent research is in the fields of web data mining and search, and cloud systems.

Email: tyang at cs.ucsb.edu

Subhash Suri

Dr. Subhash Suri is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Suri joined the Department in 2000. His PhD is from Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include: algorithms, networked sensing, data streams, computational geometry, and game theory.

Email: suri at cs.ucsb.edu

Daniel Lokshtanov

Daniel Lokshtanov is a Professor of Computer Science at UCSB. He received his PhD in Computer Science (2009), from the University of Bergen. Lokshtanov spent two years (2010-2012) as a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California at San Diego, and 6 as a faculty at the Department of Informatics at the University of Bergen. His main research interests are in graph algorithms, parameterized algorithms and complexity. He is a recipient of the Meltzer prize, the Bergen Research Foundation young researcher grant, and of an ERC starting grant on parameterized algorithms. He is a co-author of the recent textbooks on Parameterized Algorithms and Kernelization.

Email: daniello at ucsb.edu

Yao Qin

Prof. Qin focuses her research on robustness of machine learning, including adversarial robustness and out-of-distribution generalization. In addition, she has an interest in developing general machine learning algorithms and applying them to computer vision, natural language processing, and healthcare applications, especially diabetes.

Email: yaoqin at ucsb.edu

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Zheng Zhang Zheng Zhang is a Professor in ECE. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and joined the UCSB faculty in 2017. His research includes uncertainty quantification and tensor computation with multi-domain applications including CAD of nano-scale IC/MEMS/photonics, data analytics, machine learning and autonomous systems. Email: zhengzhang at ece.ucsb.edu		Kerem Çamsari Kerem Çamsari is an Associate Professor in the ECE department working at the Orchestrating Physics for Unconventional Systems (OPUS) Lab. His research interests including nanoelectronics, spintronics, Emerging Technologies for Computing, Digital and Mixed-signal VLSI, Neuromorphic and Probabilistic Computing, Quantum Computing, and Hardware Acceleration. Email: camsari at ece.ucsb.edu
Yuheng Bu Dr. Bu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He joined the Department of Computer Science at UCSB in 2025. His research lie in the intersection of machine learning, information theory, and signal processing. He leverages the tools from information theory and statistical signal processing to foundational machine-learning problems to develop theoretically justified algorithms for diverse applications, including watermarking generative AI, fair machine learning, uncertainty quantification, and model compression. Email: buyuheng at ucsb.edu		James Preiss James A. Preiss is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. Before joining UCSB, he was a postdoctoral scholar in Computing + Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. James has made contributions to a broad spectrum of topics in robotics, including control, learning, motion planning, and software platforms. Email: preiss at ucsb.edu
Yekaterina Kharitonova (Prof Kate) Prof Kate is an Associate Teaching Professor in the CS department at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Her current work focuses on incorporating cybersecurity, real-world data, and responsible AI integration into the computing curricula. Email: ykk at cs.ucsb.edu		Eric Vigoda Eric Vigoda is a Professor in CS. Before coming to UCSB in 2021, he was at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he served as the Director of the Algorithms and Randomness Center (ARC). Since finishing his Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1999, he has also had appointments at Chicago, Edinburgh, Weizmann, and KAIST. His research is in theoretical computer science, especially Markov chain methods and randomized algorithms. Email: vigoda at cs.ucsb.edu

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Murphy Niu Murphy Yuezhen Niu is an Assistant Professor and Stansbury Chair in Computer Science at UCSB since 2024. Previously, she was a senior research scientist in the Google Quantum AI team, where her work focused on intelligent quantum control optimization and metrology, quantum machine learning, quantum algorithm design and near-term quantum error correction. Niu received her doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics from MIT in 2018. She received the Claude E. Shannon Research Assistantship for her work at the intersection of photonic quantum computation, quantum error correction and quantum cryptography. Professor Niu's long-term research goal is to develop quantum computing paradigms in regard to how we program, control, characterize, measure, and error correct a large-scale quantum computer without paying the steep price of digitization towards real-world impacts. Niu applies cutting-edge deep reinforcement learning and generative models to quantum control, quantum circuit compilation, and quantum system learning using some of the largest quantum computers based on superconducting qubits. Her recent research focus on developing scalable analog quantum control and algorithms for emerging quantum architectures with superconducting, ion trap, photonic, and neutral atom qubits. Email: murphyniu at ucsb.edu		Tobias Hollerer Tobias Hollerer is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Professor Hollerer joined the Department in 2002. His Ph.D. is from Columbia University. His research interests include: Human computer interaction; computer graphics; virtual and augmented reality; wearable and ubiquitous computing. Email: holl at cs.ucsb.edu
Peng Li Peng Li received the Ph. D. degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. He was on the faculty of Texas A&M University from August 2004 to June 2019. Since July 2019, he has been with University of California at Santa Barbara as a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests are in brain-inspired computing, electronic design automation, integrated circuits and systems, robust machine learning, and application of machine learning to IC design. Email: lip at ece.ucsb.edu