Northwestern CS Welcomes New Tenure-Track Faculty Members

Northwestern Engineering’s Department of Computer Science welcomes two jointly appointed faculty members and one core tenure-track faculty member as part of the ongoing University growth initiative.

“I am delighted that our faculty recruitment efforts this year were successful," said Samir Khuller, Peter and Adrienne Barris Chair of Computer Science. "We hired faculty with a diverse collection of research focus areas to continue strengthening our research and teaching programs.”

Jointly Appointed Faculty

Sam Kriegman will join this fall as assistant professor of computer science with a joint appointment in chemical and biological engineering and mechanical engineering. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Tufts University and Harvard University, where he created new kinds of robots for technological and biological applications, and, sometimes, for fun. Kriegman’s research involves computational approaches to the automated design and manufacture of mechanical, chemical, and biological robots. A recipient of the Cozzarelli Prize, awarded annually to six research teams whose Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences articles have made outstanding contributions to their field, his work introducing the world’s first computer-designed organisms (the “xenobots”) has generated considerable global media attention and was displayed as an exhibit at the Design Museum in London. Kriegman earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Vermont in 2020, and received the Basic and Applied Science Category Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Miklos Z. Racz will start in January 2023 as an assistant professor of computer science with a joint appointment in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He joins Northwestern from Princeton University, where he served as assistant professor of operations research and financial engineering and an associated faculty member at the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. Racz’s research interests lie broadly at the interface of probability, statistics, computer science, and information theory. He earned a PhD in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a postdoc in the Theory Group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. Racz’s research and teaching have been recognized by the Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) Howard B. Wentz Jr. Junior Faculty Award, Excellence in Teaching Award, and SEAS Innovation Award.

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Core Tenure-track CS Faculty

Andrew Crotty will join in September as an assistant professor of computer science. His research primarily explores the design of systems for large-scale data analytics and data science, for which he received a Google PhD Fellowship in 2016 related to his work on the Tupleware project. Crotty joins Northwestern following a joint appointment postdoctoral researcher position with the computer science departments at Carnegie Mellon University and Brown University. Previously, he served as a postdoctoral researcher in the Data Science Initiative at Brown University, where he also earned a PhD in computer science in 2019.