Rice Computer Science doctoral students Constantinos Chamzas and Fan Yang have been named Future Faculty Fellows by the George R. Brown School of Engineering. Chamzas and Yang were two of 10 to receive the honor. The fellowships are designed to support Ph.D. and postdoctoral researchers who are applying for tenure-track faculty positions this year.
The fellows will attend faculty panels, workshops, one-on-one coaching sessions and a mock interview designed to support them as they prepare for faculty interviews. A monetary award of $1,000 will support each fellow for attending conferences and university seminars.
Renata Ramos, associate dean for academic affairs, and Tracy Volz, director of the school’s ACTIVATE Engineering Communication Program, scheduled 17 Future Faculty Fellow events for the 2022-23 academic year.
Volz and the Engineering Communications Program will run most of the workshops to assist the fellows in preparing their job talks, written statements, and cover letters. One workshop will be led by the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE), focusing on teaching statements, and another will be led by the assistant director of diversity, equity, inclusion and outreach in the Engineering Dean’s Office, Dr. Cecilia Fernandez, focusing on diversity statements.
The panels, hosted by Ramos, will feature some of the School of Engineering’s professors and alumni. There will also be a panel to discuss the different types of institutions and faculty positions, where professors from other institutions will be sharing their experiences.
Constantinos Chamzas is a sixth-year doctoral student in computer science (CS), working with Lydia Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of CS, and Anshumali Shrivastava, associate professor of CS. He earned a Diploma (M.S. equivalent) in ECE from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2017, and was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to study at Rice. His research interests focus on algorithmic robotics, with an emphasis on integrating learning-based methods with classic robotic planning algorithms.
Fan Yang is a second-year doctoral student in CS working in the lab of Xia (Ben) Hu, associate professor of CS and director of the Data to Knowledge Lab. He earned a B.S.and M.S. in electrical engineering from Xidian University in China in 2013 and 2016, respectively. From 2016 to 2021, he conducted his Ph.D. research in ECE and CS from Texas A&M University. His research focuses on developing effective and efficient model interpretation techniques for eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI).
See the full list of Future Faculty Fellows.