Personal Mention

Lorrie Cranor and Ziv Bar-Joseph have accepted FORE Systems Professorships, which were established in 1995 to support faculty members in the School of Computer Science.

• Cranor is a professor in the Institute for Software Research and the associate head of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy. She is a leading researcher in both online privacy and usable privacy and security, and directs the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory. She is co-director of the Institute for Software Research’s Privacy Engineering master’s degree program. In 2016, she served as chief technologist at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. She is also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, Inc., a security awareness training company.

• Bar-Joseph is a computer science professor in the Machine Learning and Computational Biology departments. He conducts research in computational biology, bioinformatics and machine learning. One of his interests is how shared principles between computation and biology can be used to improve understanding of both fields. He heads the School of Computer Science’s Systems Biology Group, which develops computational methods for understanding the interactions, dynamics and conservation of complex biological systems. Learn more.

Kevin Gonzalez, an assistant professor of English, is one of 36 writers to be granted a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. Selected from nearly 1,700 eligible applicants, Gonzalez will use the $25,000 grant to work on a new novel, “Statehood.” The book will span three generations and examine the shifting social and political landscape of Puerto Rico from the 1940s to the present. “Kevin is an impressive and talented fiction writer and I’m sure this award is only one of the many national awards he’s sure to win,” said Sharon Dilworth, director of the Creative Writing program. Learn more.

Roberta Klatzky, a world-renowned expert in cognition who examines the relationships between human perception and action, with a focus on touch, has been elevated to a fellow in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest technical professional organization. The IEEE fellow status is a distinction reserved for select members who have demonstrated extraordinary accomplishments in an IEEE field of interest. Klatzky, the Charles J. Queenan Professor of Psychology and a professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, is being recognized for contributions to human visual, auditory and haptic perception in robotics and virtual environments. She investigates perception, action and touch from the perspective of multiple modalities, sensory and symbolic, in real and virtual environments. Her research has been instrumental to the development of telemanipulation, image-guided surgery, navigation aids for the blind and neural rehabilitation. Learn more.

Ken Koedinger, professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and Department of Psychology, has accepted the Hillman Professorship of Computer Science. Koedinger’s research aims to understand human learning and create educational technologies that increase student achievement. He leads the LearnLab, the scientific arm of CMU’s Simon Initiative, and is a co-founder of Carnegie Learning Inc., which markets tutoring software, textbooks and other educational products. His research has contributed new principles and techniques for the design of educational software and has produced basic cognitive science research results on the nature of mathematical thinking and learning.

Janet Madelle Feindel, professor of voice and Alexander Technique and a dialect coach in the School of Drama, recently led a presentation, "Alexander Technique Value in Vocal Stability," and a workshop at the Pacific Voice Conference in San Francisco. There, she was awarded a lifetime honorary membership to the Pacific Voice and Speech Foundation for her "exemplary contributions to the pedagogy and care of the artistic voice." She is currently on sabbatical working on her book "Up and Out-Finding the Spine in Acting." In January she will be presenting at the Freedom To Act Conference in New York City, where she will lead a workshop titled “Air Beneath My Wings.” The workshop will focus on the integration of the acting voice and Alexander Technique.