Elham Kashefi

We are pleased to announce that Elham Kashefi will be appointed to a Lecturership in the School of Informatics, from 1^st October.

Elham received her BSc. and MSc. degrees, in Mathematics (Major in Combinatorics), from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. In 1999 she joined Imperial College of London as a research assistant in the formal methods and programming language group.

She started her Ph.D. in 2000 under the supervision of Vlatko Vedral and graduated from department of computing, Imperial College in 2003. Her thesis was on complexity analysis and semantics for quantum computing.

She was then awarded a four-year junior research fellowship at Christ Church College, Oxford to work on foundational structures for quantum information and computation. During this period she spent 2005 in Canada as a post doctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo, to work on depth complexity and parallel computing. From March 2006 until 2007 she was a visiting scientist at MIT, in the Department of Theoretical Physics, exploring the connection between measurement-based models, adiabatic and topological quantum computing.

Elham has recently been awarded a five-year EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship, which she will hold at Edinburgh, to allow her to focus on measurement-based quantum computing and its relation to other quantum models.

Elham's current research interests include: formalising physical computations, classical cryptography secure against quantum attacks, models of quantum computing and their structural relations, and exploring new applications, algorithms and protocols for quantum computing.

Vincent Danos

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Vincent Danos to a Chair in Computational Systems Biology.

Vincent has pursued various lines of research during his career, from mathematical logic and the semantics of programming languages, to probabilistic and agent-based models, and comes to us from a position as Directeur de Recherches at the CNRS. He has spent the past year visiting the Harvard Medical School, and working in a start-up company trying to bring agent based techniques to bear on the representation of cellular signalling networks.

At Edinburgh he plans to lead the development of an efficient bottom-up simulation platform for cellular signalling, that will enable the rapid generation of cellular insight—including causal information—without requiring significant modeling or quantitative capability from the user.

Richard Mayr

We are pleased to announce that Richard Mayr will be joining Informatics in October, as a lecturer.

Richard received his MSc in Computer Science from the TU-Müunchen, Germany, in 1994. In 1998 he obtained his PhD in Formal Methods (Model Checking Infinite-State Systems) from the TU-München, Germany.

During postdoctoral stints at the University of Edinburgh (UK) in 1999 and the University Paris 7 (France) in 2000, he worked on semantic equivalences. He joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Freiburg (Germany) in 2001. There he extended his research area to infinite real-time and probabilistic systems and received a postdoctoral degree ("Habilitation") in 2002.

In 2004 he moved to Raleigh, NC, USA, to join the department of Computer Science at NC State University as assistant professor.

His current research interests include Petri nets and process algebra, model checking and semantic equivalences, efficient algorithms for the verification of real-time and probabilistic systems, Markov chains, Markov reward models and stochastic games.

Milner Lecture 2007: Ron Fagin

28th June 2007

The 2007 Milner Lecture will be given at 16.00 on 28th June by Ron Fagin of IBM Almaden.

Rahul Santhanam

I am pleased to announce that Dr. Rahul Santhanam will be joining the School as a Lecturer in August this year. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto.

Rahul graduated with a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1998. He obtained an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago in 2005 under the supervision of Prof. Lance Fortnow and Prof. Janos Simon. Before taking up his current post in Toronto, he was a postdoctoral associate at Simon Fraser University, working with Prof. Valentine Kabanets.

Rahul's primary research interest is in theoretical computer science, with an emphasis on computational complexity. He is currently working on problems concerning hierarchy theorems, derandomization and circuit lower bounds.

Amin Coja-Oghlan

I am pleased to announce that Dr.Amin Coja-Oghlan will be joining the School as a Reader in October this year. He is currently supported by a Heisenberg advanced researcher fellowship awarded by the German research foundation.

Amin received his MSc in Mathematics from the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 1999. In 2001 he obtained his PhD in Probability Theory from the University of Hamburg, Germany, where he also graduated with an MSc in Computer Science in 2003.

In 2001 Coja-Oghlan joined the Algorithms and Complexity group at Humboldt University, Berlin, as a postdoc. Since then, his research has been focused on probabilistic methods in computer science -- particularly on the use of randomness in the design and analysis of algorithms. In 2005 he received a postdoctoral degree ("Habilitation") at Humboldt, where from 2003 until 2006 he held a temporary professorship. In 2007 he moved to Pittsburgh, PA, USA, to hold his Heisenberg fellowship as a visiting research scholar at Carnegie Mellon University.

His current research interests include the use of spectral techniques and semidefinite programming in algorithm design as well as the impact of concepts from statistical physics on computer science.