Personal Mention

André Platzer, a professor in the School of Computer Science, has been named an Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Artificial Intelligence at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. The professorship, Germany's most valuable international research award, has an endowment of up to 5 million euros and is awarded by the Alexander Humboldt Foundation and financed by Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Platzer will head the Institute for the Reliability of Autonomous Dynamical Systems at KIT and continue to work with CMU. Platzer focuses on ensuring computer systems operating critical infrastructure make the correct decisions to optimize performance, robustness and safety. He has developed methods that allow systems to be analyzed and checked to verify they are making these decisions correctly. Platzer has collaborated with government and industries such as Bosch, Siemens and Toyota to improve the safety of cyber-physical systems used in rail networks, air traffic and medical robotics. He has appointments in CMU's Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments and the Robotics Institute. Learn more about Platzer.

En Cai, assistant professor of biological sciences, has received a two-year grant from the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation to help jumpstart her lab that studies T-cell communication. Cai is studying T-cell activation and inhibition mechanisms in an effort to discover how T-cells communicate with each other and respond to their environments. To do this, she is looking at T-cells at the microscopic level to see how they attack tumor cells. T-cells are part of the immune system and develop from stem cells in the bone marrow, helping to protect the body from infection. “Sometimes T-cells fail to attack tumor cells and that is because the tumor environment makes them unable to do that,” Cai said. “We want to understand how the environment has an effect on T-cells and how we can restore this mechanism.” Cai will use some of the grant money to invest in a specialized microscope, known as a lattice light sheet microscope, that will capture subcellular details of the cells and how the cells use their receptors and membranes to detect their environment and make decisions. Learn more about Cai and her work.

G. Sayeed Choudhury will join University Libraries in a newly created role to raise awareness of and stimulate collaboration among open-source projects that take place across the university. Choudhury is coming to CMU from Johns Hopkins University, where he is associate dean for digital infrastructure, applications, and services and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries. “His work at Johns Hopkins has been transformational, and he will join a university eager to link to a growing network of academic Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs)," said Keith Webster, the Helen and Henry Posner, Jr. Dean of University Libraries and director of Emerging and Integrative Media Initiatives. At Johns Hopkins, Choudhury led the Johns Hopkins' OSPO that Sheridan Libraries launched in 2021, the first university-based OSPO in the U.S. As associate dean, he had oversight for data curation research and development and data archive implementation at the Libraries. Choudhury has served as principal investigator for projects funded through the National Science Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Library of Congress' NDIIPP, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Microsoft Research, and a Maryland-based venture capital group. Learn more about Choudhury.