AccessComputing Team Members Complete Their PhDs

Multiple AccessComputing Team Members graduated with PhDs this year. Congratulations to them all. Below are the students who announced their graduation and let us know what the future holds:

• Heriberto Acosta Maestre received his Ph.D. in information systems from the College of Computing and Engineering at Nova Southeastern University. His dissertation titled "The Empirical Study of the Factors that Influence Threat Avoidance Behavior in Ransomware Security Incidents" focused on studying threat avoidance behavior in the context of ransomware security incidents among college students. He is interested in information security, human computing interactions, health data science, and data mining applications. Heriberto continues to work as the distributed learning program training administrator in the Puerto Rico National Guard. He volunteered at the Tapia 2022 conference as deputy chair of posters.
• Huy Từ defended their dissertation on the topic of "Reducing Effort of Labeling Software Engineering Data with Semi-supervised Learning" from North Carolina State University. Beside their PhD's dissertation topic, they are also invested in linguistic and machine learning fairness domains. Currently, Huy is following their passions in investigating and mitigating biases in decision-making at one of the big five tech companies.
• Carl C Haynes-Magyar received his Ph.D. in information from the University of Michigan School of Information in the winter semester of 2022. His dissertation is titled "On Learning How to Program via an Interactive eBook with Parsons Problems." Carl's research broadly focuses on how people learn and how people learn how to learn to design theory-based learning technologies for computing education that support symbiotic relationships between learners and artificial intelligence. In the fall of 2022, Carl began as a presidential postdoctoral fellow at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University with Dr. Kenneth R. Koedinger.
• Shamma Nasrin received her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois Chicago. Some of her research interests include neuromorphic computing, deep learning neural networks, and low-power and high-performance in-memory processing systems.
• Andrea Lane received her Ph.D. in biostatistics in August 2022 from Emory University. Her dissertation is titled “Detecting Cell-type-specific Mediation Effects in DNA Methylation Data.” She is passionate about statistics/data science education and incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusion principles into statistics courses. She is now an assistant professor of the practice at Duke University in the master of interdisciplinary data science (MIDS) program.
• Dhruv Jain received his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington in spring 2022. His dissertation is entitled “Sound Sensing and Feedback Techniques for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People.” He is now an assistant professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. His research intersects human-computer interaction (HCI) and applied machine learning (ML), with a focus on sound accessibility.
• Elba Garza received a Ph.D. in computer science from Texas A&M University. Her work focused on making hardware predictive structures and policies more resilient to evolving computing demands. Over the last few years, Elba has earned honors such as the 2020 IEEE Computer Society Lance Stafford Larson Student Award, named a 2020 Rising Star in EECS, and was a 2021 Google Scholar. She is currently an assistant teaching professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.

Congratulations to all those who graduated and are moving forward to the next steps in their careers.