Meet our computer and information science faculty

Professor, Department of Computer Science

Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed is professor at the Department of Computer Science and director of the Ubicomp Research Lab. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Arizona State University in 2003 under the direction of Stephen S. Yau. Ahamed has a strong performance record in research, with a career record of over $1 million in external research funding. His current projects cover a number of state-of-the-art advances in medical computing and mobile computing.

Ahamed's research work focuses on building customized and innovative patient communication methods through technology, developing new and innovative approaches for health monitoring, pain management, mapping technologies, and activity monitoring for smartphones. He has worked with hospitals in the U.S. and internationally on a number of projects, as well as with leading companies in the healthcare industry. Ahamed has worked with a number of engineers, nurses and physicians on 20 healthcare grants over the past 13 years. Projects included work with cell phones, sensors, tablets, web applications and HIPAA-compliant cloud servers. His experience extends to working with patient populations in the American Indian and Hispanic communities.

Associate Professor of Practice, Department of Computer Science

Dr. Walter Bialkowski is an associate professor of practice in computer science in the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette. Bialkowski is an expert at directing complex research programs and tailoring clinical studies to appropriate levels of regulatory oversight. After establishing a comprehensive portfolio of clinical study implementation successes in varied settings and with diverse patient populations, he completed advanced formal training in clinical study design and epidemiology at Marquette University. He has led and co-led a number of clinical and translational scientific studies that have advanced our understanding of drug therapy complications, human physiology, and population health. His work has also supported important policy changes including improvements in the equitable application of blood donor eligibility criteria and the management of iron deficiency in vulnerable populations.

Bialkowski is also the principal investigator of the project “Empowering Those Who Seek to End Hunger through Collaboration and Innovation” — one of three winning projects as part of the President’s Challenge for COVID-19 Response.

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Faculty Spotlight: Walter Bialkowski, Ph.D., on using data science to make a difference

Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science

Dennis Brylow’s research interests span several areas of computing. His work primarily centers on building tools to help those who design, build or teach complex systems with particular focus on embedded, real-time and interrupt-driven systems; programming languages; and software engineering. In the past decade, he has been the principal investigator on just over $5 million of extramural grant funding from the National Science Foundation, Cisco, Google, Intel and other organizations.

He directs Marquette University's relationship with Code.org as the regional partner for Wisconsin.

Teaching Associate Professor and Director CIS program, Department of Computer Science

Niharika Jain is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. Her research interests include affective computing, data analysis, machine learning and mHealth. Some of her published works include “Predicting PTSD Severity in Veterans from Self-reports for Early Intervention: A Machine Learning Approach. Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science,” and “Have It, Know It, but Don’t Show It: Examining Physiological Arousal, Anxiety, and Facial Expressions over the Course of a Social Skills Intervention for Autistic Adolescents.” She teaches “Data Structures,” “Object-oriented Software Design,” “Introduction to Software Development,” “Introduction to Computer Science,” “Nature of Mathematics,” “Calculus Courses,” and “Elementary Statistics.”

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science

Praveen Madiraju is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Computer Science. His research interests include data science/machine learning, healthcare informatics: behavioral informatics, machine learning applications for healthcare, mobile applications, and databases and big data. Recent publications include topics such as, “Predicting Opioid Overdose Readmission and Opioid Use Disorder with Machine Learning,” and “Veterans, PTSD and Social Media: Towards Identifying Trauma Text Categories using Grounded Theory.” Madiraju teaches courses such as Data Structures, Senior Design and Advanced Database Systems.

Assistant Professor of Practice, Department of Computer Science

Dr. Molla is a wearable technology researcher, and he develops novel systems with special focus on soft, flexible, and wearable applications. His general research interests include wearable technology, pervasive/ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, and data science. Previously, Dr. Molla worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. He completed his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 2020.

Dr. Molla teaches both core and advanced-level courses at Marquette related to computer science, data science, and embedded and real-time systems. He teaches the M.S. in Computer and Information Science Foundations course that is designed for individuals who do not have an undergraduate degree in computing, but who wish to cross over into the field. He is the Principal Investigator of the NSF S-STEM project at Marquette that aims to provide scholarships for academically talented low-income graduate students who are seeking to change careers and enter the field of computing.

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Faculty Spotlight: Md. Tahmidul Islam Molla, Ph.D., on Marquette’s innovative career-changer path to an online computing degree

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science

Debbie Perouli is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science. Perouli’s interests lie in network protocol design and analysis, network topology modeling, security of the Internet routing protocols, and the security of physical-cyber systems. She has published works such as, “Solving Set Cover with Pairs Problem using Quantum Annealing” and “Experimental Framework for BGP Security Evaluation.”

Read “Debbie Perouli, Ph.D. on the value of collaboration in computer science” on the Marquette University Computer and Information and Science blog.

Northwestern Mutual Assistant Professor, Computer Science

Sabirat Rubya is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Marquette University. Her research areas are HCI, social computing, health informatics and human-aided machine learning. Her research focuses on recommending and designing mobile health technologies for critical health contexts. She completed her B.Sc. in computer science from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and her Ph.D. in computer science from University of Minnesota.

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science

Thomas Schwarz is a Jesuit priest and is currently an associate professor in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences and the Department of Computer Science. Previously, he was an associate professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at Santa Clara University before spending five years teaching in Latin America at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay and at the Universidad Centro-Americana in El Salvador.

Schwarz holds two doctorates, one in mathematics from the Fernuniversität Hagen (1984) and one in computer science from the University of California (1994). He has more than 100 publications in mathematics and computer science.

His research interests are in distributed systems and in particular large storage systems. He is very interested in collaboration with Jesuit institutions around the world.

Northwestern Mutual Assistant Professor

Nasim Yahyasoltani is currently the Northwestern Mutual Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Marquette University. She obtained her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota in June 2014 under the supervision of Professor Georgios B. Giannakis. Prior to joining Marquette University, she was a senior data scientist at Harley-Davidson Motor Company. Her research interests include statistical signal processing, machine learning, optimization theory and network science with applications to wireless communications and networking, smart grid and healthcare.

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science

Dr. Keyang Yu’s research focuses on designing data-driven computer systems with an emphasis on improving Cybersecurity and User Privacy of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT). Recently, Dr. Yu has been looking into privacy-aware automation problems in different scales of CPS.

Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Computer Science

Michael Zimmer is a privacy and data ethics scholar, whose work focuses on digital privacy and surveillance, internet research ethics, and the broader social and ethical dimensions of emerging technologies. Zimmer is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Marquette University and is an affiliated faculty at the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute.

Zimmer’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the American Library Association, among other sources.

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Faculty spotlight: Dr. Michael Zimmer, Director of Center for Data, Ethics, and Society

Michael Zimmer honored for connecting tech, data and ethics