Meet the Faculty

Ilmi Yoon is a teaching professor and a director of computing programs in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Silicon Valley.

Yoon joined Khoury College in 2024 after two dozen years at San Francisco State University to explore a different education system that would impact more students. As an instructor for discrete structures courses in the Align program, she loves to meet students in their first semester, support their journey into computer science, and watch them grow beyond her expectations. Yoon researches human-centered AI, video accessibility, and socially responsible computing, all with the goal of engaging underrepresented and marginalized groups in computing and computing education.

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Omar Alonso is a principal data scientist lead at Microsoft in Silicon Valley, where he works on the intersection of social media, temporal information, knowledge graphs, and human computation. He is the co-organizer of DESIRES, a new information retrieval conference with a focus on system implementation and experimental design (http://desires.dei.unipd.it/). He is also co-chair of the crowdsourcing and human computation track for WWW 2019. He holds a PhD from the University of California at Davis and an undergraduate degree from UNICEN, Argentina.

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Tehmina Amjad is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Silicon Valley. In this role, she teaches computer science courses, with a focus on Discrete structures, Databases, and Computer Systems and some specialized courses like Information Retrieval. Tehmina’s passion lies in fostering a deep understanding of core computational concepts and preparing students for success in their academic and professional careers.

In her research, Tehmina has delved into a litany of topics, including citation analysis, topic modeling, knowledge diffusion, health care analytics, machine learning, neural networks, natural language processing, author name disambiguation, and library information sciences. The slew of leading journals in which she has published — including Future Generation Computer Systems, Scientometrics, and multiple IEEE publications — reflects her never-ending appetite for exploring new areas and working on challenging issues. Currently, she has established a research group tiled “Information Retrieval Research Group” where students who are interested in research in this area have joined her. Currently this research group is working on sentiment analysis methods more focused towards identification of negation and sarcasm detection. More information about her research interest can be found from her google scholar page and personal website.

Outside of academia, Tehmina enjoys traveling to scenic locations with her family, where she can experience other cultures and interact with new people.

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Ricardo Baeza-Yates is a professor of the practice at the Institute for Experiential Artificial Intelligence of Northeastern University.

He came to Northeastern after his role as the chief technology officer of NTENT, a semantic search technology company based in California. Prior to these roles, he was the VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Sunnyvale, California, from August 2014 to February 2016. Before joining Yahoo Labs in California, he founded and led the Yahoo Labs in Barcelona and Santiago de Chile from 2006 to 2015. Between 2008 and 2012, he oversaw Yahoo Labs in Haifa, Israel, and started the London lab in 2012.

Baeza-Yates is a part-time professor at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, as well as at the Department of Computing Science of Universidad de Chile in Santiago. During 2005, he was an ICREA research professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Until 2004, he was a professor and founding director of the Center for Web Research at Universidad de Chile.

Additionally, Baeza-Yates is a co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook, published in 1999 by Addison-Wesley, with a second enlarged edition in 2011, which won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. He is also a co-author of the second edition of the Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures, Addison-Wesley, 1991, and co-editor of Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Data Structures, Prentice-Hall, 1992, among more than 600 other publications.

From 2002 to 2004 he was elected to the board of governors of the IEEE Computer Society, as well as to the ACM Council from 2012 to 2016. He has received the Organization of American States award for young researchers in exact sciences, the Graham Medal for innovation in computing given by the University of Waterloo to distinguished alumni, the CLEI Latin American distinction for contributions to CS in the region and the National Award of the Chilean Association of Engineers, among other distinctions. In 2003, he was the first computer scientist to be elected to the Chilean Academy of Sciences and, since 2010, is a founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering. In 2009, he was named ACM Fellow and, in 2011, an IEEE Fellow.

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Akram Bayat is a data scientist with expertise at the intersection of AI and healthcare. She was a postdoc associate at MIT Media Lab where her research focused on creating novel intersections between engineering, medical imaging, machine learning, and medicine to develop innovative high-impact patient-centered research. Bayat received her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Boston. During her Ph.D. research, she worked on developing machine learning algorithms for solving real-world problems and conducted experimental studies for modeling of human physical and behavioral characteristics. Bayat has significant expertise in applying deep learning for computer vision applications. Her research has been published in leading computer science conferences and journals and won numerous awards. Her recent work in computational staining of pathology images was published at Jama and mentioned at MIT News in May 2020.

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Rasika Bhalerao is an assistant teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, and teaches at both the Silicon Valley and Oakland campuses. She earned her doctorate in computer science from New York University. At Northeastern, her areas of teaching include introductory courses (Fundamentals of Computer Science and the Align program), artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and ethical computing.
Rasika is a part of various organizations, including ACM-W, Climate Change AI, Cornell Tech’s Clinic to End Tech Abuse, and ACM SIGCSE. Outside of teaching, she is learning Spanish and Mandarin, and loves to rock climb and meditate.

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Anurag Bhardwaj is a Director of Data Science at eBay where he focuses on using Machine Learning to fight fraud and risk in eCommerce marketplace. Prior to eBay, he led machine learning efforts at Wiser - a bay area start-up where he worked on building a unified structured product catalog for retail. His research interests include Large Scale Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Deep Learning. He also teaches an online course "Text Mining" on statistics.com and just published a book titled "Deep Learning Essentials". Anurag received his PhD and MS from the State University of New York at Buffalo and holds a B.Tech in computer engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, India.

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Dr. Yeh-Cheng Chen is an adjunct faculty of Computer Science major in distributed systems, data mining, and cybersecurity. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis.

Dr. Chen’s research spans distributed systems, operating systems, big data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, and information security. His work has significantly contributed to advancements in social computing, RFID technology, network security, and intelligent systems for healthcare and manufacturing. With over 50 peer-reviewed publications in prestigious journals and conferences, Dr. Chen has established himself as a thought leader in his field.

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PhD in Computer Networks, Boston University. BS in Computer Science, Zhejiang University, China. Software Engineer at Google.

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Maryam Farahmand-Asil is an assistant teaching professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Silicon Valley and Oakland.

Maryam’s teaching expertise spans discrete and data structures, algorithms, and programming for data science. She is passionate about instilling a deep appreciation for mathematics and computer science in her students. Outside the classroom, Maryam’s research is centered on computer science education, and she received the 2023 Khoury Teaching Innovation Award for an ongoing project that aims to enhance student engagement in computing courses.

Before joining Khoury College in 2022, Maryam held positions as an assistant professor of mathematics at Mills College and a visiting assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. She was honored with the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award at UC Berkeley in 2016.

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John Alexis Guerra Gómez is an associate teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University’s Silicon Valley campus.

During his undergraduate years studying computer science at the Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira, Guerra Gómez developed his love for computers and passion for solving problems through research. In 2003, Guerra Gómez worked with a group of classmates to co-found DUTO, a startup that helps blind students “see” shapes with their hands. After ten years, the system was implemented in three schools in Colombia. While he was serving as chief development officer at DUTO and completing his graduate degree, Guerra Gómez lectured at the Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira until 2007.

Guerra Gómez was a 2008 recipient of the Fulbright Science and Technology Scholarship, which allowed him to achieve his dream of becoming a scientist by completing his doctorate at the University of Maryland. He joined UMD’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab, working under Catherine Plaisant and Ben Shneiderman – both pioneers of the information visualization and user interface design fields.

After receiving his doctorate in 2013, Guerra Gómez moved to San Jose to work for PARC, a Xerox company, where he helped catch fraud and abuse in the medical system through network visualization. He then moved on to Yahoo Labs as an information visualization research scientist where he worked closely with Flickr to provide better interfaces for navigating photo repositories and presenting photo statistics. Guerra Gómez then moved back to Colombia where he was an assistant professor at Los Andes University, and was part of the visual computing research group, IMAGINE. During that time, Guerra Gómez was hired as a remote lecturer at UC Berkeley, where he taught the data visualization course in the Master’s in Data Science program. While at UC Berkeley, he worked to redesign the master’s curriculum.

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Lama Hamandi is an Associate Teaching Professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. She teaches graduate courses such as Algorithms, Computer Systems, Fundamentals of Computer Networking, Large-Scale Parallel Data Processing, and the Align course Data Structures, Algorithms, & their Applications within Computer Systems. She is passionate about Gamification of Computer Science education, and she supervises students who create engaging games for practicing various Algorithms. Lama is the course Lead of the Algorithms course across Northeastern University campuses, and she is an elected member of the Faculty Senate.

Lama was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She got her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the American University of Beirut. She earned her master’s and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Ohio State University. Prior to joining Northeastern, Lama taught at various universities in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia such as the American University of Beirut, Beirut Arab University and King Saud University. Her research focused on parallel processing, natural language processing, and machine learning, and she published several papers in refereed journals and conferences. Her most recent work focuses on gamification of Algorithms.

At these universities, Lama taught a variety of courses including electric circuits, electronics, analog signal processing, digital logic design, computer organization and architecture, assembly language programming, microprocessors, data communication networks, operating systems, C/C++ programming, data structures, and discrete math.

Lama has been a technical reviewer for various journals and conferences, and a session and program chair at various conferences. She is a member of IEEE and ACM, and a member of various academic committees at Northeastern University.

Outside of the classroom, Lama is passionate about nature and she enjoys hiking and picnics with the family.

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Jeongkyu Lee is a teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, data science, machine learning and robotics.

Lee earned his doctorate in computer science from the University of Texas at Arlington and his master’s in computer science from Sogang University in South Korea. Before pursuing his doctorate, he worked as a database administrator with companies including Hana Bank and IBM Korea. Lee’s work has been published in journals such as IEEE, ACM and MDPI. Outside of academic research, Lee is passionate about traveling via train, which he finds exciting and relaxing.

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Shivakumar Mathapathi is an adjunct faculty member at Northeastern University as well at UC San Diego, Extension; he is also teaching at regional community academia including ethnically diverse institutions such as Ohlone and De-Anza College in California.

Shivakumar has been a passionate educator for nearly 25 years of industry experience with a strong desire to help students recognize the connection between learning and industry needs. He is an accomplished researcher and a co-founder of Dew Mobility Incorporated and Xtrans Solutions (P) Limited. His teaching and research areas include the internet of things (IoT), machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). He has authored numerous articles published in prestigious journals, including IEEE, and various conferences, such as NIST Smart City projects.

He is the co-founder of Xtrans, which is a leading company in establishing center of excellence (CoE) to assist higher education to educate their students about the next generation internet research and development (R&D) programs.

Shivakumar is a team lead of the education cluster at the Global City Team Challenge project in collaboration with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), under the U.S. Department of Commerce. He is the key contributor in creating tutorials, workshop and practice use cases for smart cities. The workshop also discusses about IoT standards and protocol which would help community partners and city/municipality staff to get familiar with national as well as international IoT standards.

Shivakumar received his MS degree in technology and innovation management from Northcentral University, California.

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Mark L. Miller, PhD completed his doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, in 1979, specializing in applications of artificial intelligence to education.

In 2000, Miller founded Learningtech.org®, incorporating it as The Miller Institute for Learning with Technology, a California 501(c)(3) non-profit. He serves as both its lead technical contributor and its President and Executive Director. The mission of the organization is to help “children of all ages” use technology more effectively for learning. The firm has helped schools throughout California and in several other states. Services include: E Rate applications; technology plan preparation; professional development relating to Computer Science, Robotics and Making; IT consultation (network design; server router configuration/administration; technology impact assessment); and sponsored research in the areas of Educational Technology and Computer Science Education.

Before founding Learningtech.org, Dr. Miller served as Lab Director for Learning and Tools at Apple, reporting to the Vice President, Advanced Technology Group [ATG], where he spent almost a decade heading up educational technology investigations. Apple programs under his direction at various times included: Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow [ACOT]; Apple Global Education [AGE]; Visualization and Simulation; Business Learning and Performance Support; and Multimedia Authoring Tools. Responsibilities included oversight of over three-dozen employees, including Apple Distinguished Scientists and numerous engineers with advanced degrees, with annual budget responsibility in excess of $6M.

Dr. Miller’s industry experience includes Texas Instruments’ Central Research Labs [TI], where Miller established its widely recognized Machine Intelligence research program, emphasizing educational applications, expert systems, natural language processing. Miller later co-founded Computer*Thought Corporation (Dallas, TX), a high-tech TI spinoff backed by venture capital, where he led the design of an advanced instructional system to retrain software engineers for the Ada programming language, then being implemented for the International Space Station.

Dr. Miller’s teaching experience includes the University of Texas (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence; Survey of Knowledge Engineering; Design and Implementation of Programming Languages; Compilers, Assemblers, and Operating Systems; Software Engineering Using Ada; Discrete Structures). He also supervised successful M.S. and Ph.D. candidates at UT and Southern Methodist University. While a graduate student at MIT he served as both Research Assistant and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Artificial Intelligence and LOGO Laboratories, and as a Research Assistant at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. Miller has also taught high school mathematics, computer science, making, and other topics at K12 schools, Community Colleges, and County Offices of Education. He developed and co-delivered a high school CS elective that received University of California “G requirement” approval, for use at multiple schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. In June 2020, Miller, along with Cynthia Solomon and a half-dozen Logo pioneers, published an article, History of Logo, in ACM SIGPLAN’s History of Programming Languages journal, describing the early development of this highly influential programming language for children. Logo was made famous by Seymour Papert (1980), in Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas). Miller worked with Papert at MIT and TI; some of Miller’s contributions are mentioned in the End Notes of Papert’s seminal publication. Mark is President Emeritus of the Computer Science Teachers Association [CSTA] Silicon Valley. He also teaches Python and Java in the ALIGN graduate program at Northeastern University’s San Francisco and Silicon Valley campuses. He is an active participant in California’s growing efforts to bring CS to K-12 education — with attention to equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Read more about Mark Miller

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Dr. Smruthi Mukund is the Director of AI/ML at JP Morgan Chase, where she spearheads the Personalization and Insights initiative, dedicated to creating user-centric features and recommendation systems prioritizing customer needs. Prior to her tenure at Chase, Dr. Mukund held leadership roles in AI/ML teams at Twitter and Amazon, amassing over 15 years of industry expertise. With a strong commitment to responsible AI, she actively promotes ethical practices in the field. Concurrently, Dr. Mukund serves as a part-time faculty member at Northeastern University, where she has been teaching ML and Algorithms for over four years. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from SUNY Buffalo.

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Karl Ni is a Part-Time Lecturer at Northeastern University in Silicon Valley. In this role, he teaches graduate courses in AI / ML courses like Data Mining, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, etc. In his full-time role, he is currently the Head of Recommendations Infrastructure at Etsy, Inc., leading three squads to connect buyers to 150 million seller listings on the platform. Before joining Etsy, he was an area technical lead at Google Search, where his team was responsible for proactively surfacing queries to users on the app, mobile web, and search bar. Previously, he was the Technical Director of Lab41, In-Q-Tel, bringing together solutions at the intersection of government agencies and the venture community. Prior to this, he spent significant time at the federally funded MIT Lincoln and Livermore Laboratories working on a variety of signal processing platforms, both aerial and underwater. Karl has a PhD from the University of California at San Diego and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

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Nadim Saad is an assistant teaching professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Silicon Valley.

During his doctoral studies at Stanford University, Saad developed traffic flow models based on partial differential equations. He also built physically informed deep learning models to solve PDEs during his time as an applied scientist intern with Amazon Web Services.

Saad joined Khoury College in 2023, where he teaches a variety of foundational computer science and data science courses. Saad enjoys these courses, as he can guide students in subject areas that might be new to them and encourage them to pursue computing careers. He also enjoys teaching more specialized elective courses like “Supervised Machine Learning and Learning Theory” to help students who have already found a passion within computer science to grow their knowledge further.

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Mohammad Toutiaee is an assistant professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, data science and machine learning.

Toutiaee earned both his master’s and doctorate in computer science from the University of Georgia. He joined Northeastern in 2021, where he currently teaches discrete structures, data science and machine learning. Notable journals Toutiaee has been published in include the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, IEEE International Conference on Big Data and the International Conference on Advances in Big Data Analytics.

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Sr Program Director Dr. Kal Bugrara is the program director of information systems, software engineering systems, and data architecture and management at Northeastern University.

Dr. Kal Bugrara holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. While at the University, he focused on algorithm design and backtrack search. Dr. Bugrara is the second generation of Donald Knuth, the father of computer science, and was an advisee of Paul Purdom. Dr. Bugrara has invented the COiN technique for extracting contract intelligence and new engineering techniques used for building eco-system scale applications.

Dr. Bugrara has over 25 years of experience in management and technology consulting for Fortune 100 companies. On one of his most recent projects, he served as the strategist for transforming the Canadian Imperial Bank’s Management Consulting Services into a world-class leadership university, the first of its kind. His strategy formulation and implementation processes have been the key determinant for the success of projects.

As Director, he oversees the educational pursuits of over 1500 masters’ students in over 80 classes, and with over 40 full and part time faculty members. He has dedicated his career to studying, educating students from across the globe, and developing software engineering solutions to solve real-world software challenges that address the issues of society.

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Dr. Alomari is a seasoned technical leader with over a decade of expertise in machine learning and data engineering, thriving in both startup and corporate environments. He earned his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2010 and has played a pivotal role in driving innovation in machine learning-driven products, MLOps, and scalable data lake architectures. Currently, he is also the cofounder of Pextra Inc.

Dr. Alomari’s journey in academia spans over 22 years, during which he taught various courses in machine learning, database management, information security, and introductory computer science at the University of Jordan, Wayne State University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has over 30 publications in prestigious journals and conferences. In his most recent industry role, he was a Staff II Machine Learning Engineer at VMware Inc., where he spearheaded the design and implementation of cloud-based data and machine learning pipelines focused on cloud security, leveraging AWS services.

A strong advocate for diversity and inclusion, Dr. Alomari has been actively involved in mentoring initiatives and inclusive hiring practices throughout his career. Beyond his professional achievements, he is deeply committed to volunteer work and holds leadership roles in various community organizations, with a firm belief in giving back and fostering the next generation of talent in the technology sector.

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Dr. Suhabe Bugrara is a security researcher focusing on cryptocurrency and smart contract security. He received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in computer science and a B.Sc. from MIT. Previously, he was the founder of a healthcare machine learning startup that optimizes profitability at world-class hospitals.

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Dr. Pramod Gupta has more than 20 years of experience as a researcher and academician in various organizations including work with NASA, GE, VISA, University of California, and startups. Dr. Pramod Gupta has more than 20 years of experience He has a PhD from McMaster University in Electrical and Computer Engineering with specialization in Neuro-Control of Robotic Manipulators. He has more than 40 publications on these subjects and book entitled " Introduction to Machine Learning in Cloud with Python" published by Springer. His research areas include Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Modeling and Analytics and Data mining. Presently he is working as an independent consultant in the data science domain and as an Adjunct Faculty.

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Bala Maheswaran received his M.S. and Ph.D. in experimental solid state Physics, and MSEE in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University. He worked as a research associate and lecturer in the department physics, Northeastern University, and then joined the college of engineering. He is currently a senior faculty in the First-Year Engineering Program. He has contributed and authored about sixty publications consisting of original research and education related papers, and conference proceedings. He also has been a part of paper presentations, workshops and panel discussions in several national and international conferences. He has over twenty years of experience in teaching at Northeastern University. He is the Division Chair of Engineering Physics Division, ASEE; Chair-elect and executive board member, ASEE-NE Section; the co-chair of TASME Conference (Technological Advances in Science, Medicine and Engineering), and Academic Member of Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER), and the Head, Electrical Engineering Unit, ATHINER.

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Tejas Parikh is a Part-Time Lecturer at Northeastern University and Principle Site Reliability Engineer at Tamr, Inc. He has been teaching Master’s level courses at Northeastern University since 2017. He received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Eastern Michigan University in 2006 and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Northeastern University in 2009. He has been working on cloud computing technologies for more than 8 years with a focus on containers, container orchestration, and hybrid cloud architecture and design. He is passionate about all things open source, Linux, DevOps, SRE, automation, cloud, containers, and Kubernetes.

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Brett Ritter has been practicing the art and science of web development since the previous century and enjoys guiding students in how to constantly improve their techniques and adapt to an ever-changing industry. He has worked for or collaborated with state and federal government agencies, an AgTech company, car auction and dealership sites, the online identity platform Okta, and assorted freelance projects.

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Dr. Jagadeesh Vasudevamurthy has more than 20 years of experience in electronic design automation. He has worked on the design and development of commercial EDA tools at Cadence, Xilinx, Synplicity and Mentor Graphics. He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM. He has more than 20 years of experience in electronic design automation.

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David Bakhtnia is a technical entrepreneur, technology consultant, and project and program manager. He has over 30 years of experience in technical and internet-related products and services, supporting a variety of products and services including full-stack applications (SaaS, PasS, Web, mobile), IT infrastructure (Hadoop lab, data center, and migration), and support services. In addition, he is co-founder of a global Agile community of experienced Project and Program Managers.

He gives back to the community by teaching Agile and PM courses at (UCSC Silicon Valley extension), Northeastern University, Silicon Valley Campus, providing consulting services ( PATCA) to build and/or lead e-Solutions (eSolutionLab, and Bakhtnia.com), training and/or building collaborative environments, and speaking at events (IEEE, Meetups, Engineering, and leadership communities).

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Dr. Bergner is an energetic organizational leader, accomplished technologist, and passionate teacher with a strong commitment to his students. He has served in executive management, strategic planning, organizational development, program and project management, management of scientific research, technology R&D, engineering design, training, and teaching. During a thirty-year career at NASA, he contributed to the creation and implementation of projects, research programs, and new initiatives in various areas, including Space Biology, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Aeronautics, Organizational Risk Management, Knowledge Engineering, and Information Technology. He successfully managed multiple concurrent projects, programs, and R&D portfolios, and served as Chief of the Division of Space Biosciences at NASA Ames Research Center. He managed the Ames Project Excellence Program (APEX) to develop new cadres of emerging leaders in Project Management and Systems Engineering at Ames. After leaving NASA he established a Master of Business Administration program at Sofia University in Palo Alto, CA, which was taught in English and Mandarin Chinese, with program enrollment reaching sixteen hundred students.

Dr. Bergner teaches courses in Leadership, Management, Quantitative Methods, and Decision Science. His research interests include decision analysis, dialogue processes, organizational and team factors in data science, and online decision support communities. His work lies at the intersection of decision-making, communication systems, and design thinking, building on research he conducted as a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for Design Research. He received his Ph.D. in Management Science and M.S. in Engineering Economic Systems, both from Stanford University, and his B.S in Applied Sciences from the University of Louisville.

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Padmini has been working as a change agent with organizations since 1998. She is a certified APM from Stanford University, accredited Kanban Trainer from Lean Kanban University, teacher at Northeastern University, a Certified Scrum Master, SPC 5.0 from Scaled Agile and PMI member. For the last 15 years, she has been the CEO of CyberVardan LLC, consulting for various companies in the Silicon Valley like Microsoft, Apple, Agilent, Sony and many startups like Heru Inc. She has a solid track record in delivering projects using agile methods in cloud infrastructure integration programs, mobile software, and bioscience. Padmini is passionate about building relationships across the organization and helping to create and foster a mindset of continuous process improvement that is founded upon the values of quality, trust and respect.

Most recently, she has been teaching graduate-level classes at Northeastern University to educate the next generation professionals. Besides helping enterprises achieve their project goals, she volunteers at Sankara Eye Foundation helping to eradicate curable blindness.

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Venkata Duvvuri is currently a director of data science at Oracle corporation. He is a results-oriented data science, business, web & marketing analytics leader with over 12 years of experience in data science, business analytics, digital media analytics and web marketing optimization. He has led internationally recognized corporations, in addition to 10 years software engineering experience and a top business school MBA. He has experience in management of onshore and offshore teams as well as leadership experience ranging from director to manager at Fortune 100 companies including marketing agencies.
 
He is a cross-functional leader and subject matter expert in machine learning. He has improved ad performance by $10M at Unity Technologies & $7M at Oracle leveraging deep learning, spark MLIB and Tensorflow operating on big data. He has driven improvements in business & online marketing outcomes by several million dollars at eBay (Triad Retail Media), Conversant (Alliance Data), AT&T (Cricket Wireless) and crunched several terabytes of data at Apple Corporation. He holds a Master’s in computer science from University of Massachusetts Amherst and a MBA from University of California Davis. Additionally, he is a doctoral candidate at Purdue University. Finally, he serves on the advisory alumni board at Graduate School of Management at UC Davis.

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Dhammike is an Organizational Change Management professional with over 20 years of industry experience. He is an expert in organizational transformation, organizational change management, program and project management, agile development, communications, and process improvement. He started his career as an industrial engineer and later moved to management, and project consulting.

He got his foundation set after earning an Industrial/Production Engineering degree from the University of Peradeniya, and an MBA from Baylor University. He is equipped with many tools and industry best practices that he acquired through certifications that he earned in various disciplines like change management, and program management. Project management, and agile methodologies. He has PROSCI, APMG, PMP, CBAP, and CSM certifications on his back.

His work experience comes from the organizations like Intel, Walgreens, Kaiser, Baylor University, State of CA, Accenture, TCS, Chevron, Keurig Dr Pepper, and some other international businesses.

Teaching was his very first work gig while he was in High School. He continued his interest in teaching, training, and helping others during college, while in post-graduate education, and in corporate tenures. Nowadays, at Northeastern, he enjoys utilizing his work experience in combination with theory while teaching for career advancement.

Read more about Dhammike Fernando in this faculty feature

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Katina Gholson serves as an adjunct professor faculty member at Northeastern University Silicon Valley. In this role, she instructs graduate students within the Project Management curriculum on the practical and industry standard skills necessary to succeed and thrive in the Project Management field. Katina is passionate about sharing her knowledge and experience in an educational environment and enthusiastically looks forward to engaging with students from all walks of life and cultural backgrounds to bring about the most well-rounded and inclusive learning opportunity. She currently holds a PMP and a full-time position in the Information Technology field as a Business Relationship Manager. Prior to this role, she worked as a Director of Project Management and Continuous Improvement in the IT Department for an International Insurance Company.

Ms. Gholson has over twenty years of experience in Project Management, with a master’s degree from St. Edward’s University and a bachelor’s degree from Duke University. In her spare time, Katina enjoys traveling to culturally diverse and enriching locales and in participating in local activities with friends and family within the California Bay Area, where she resides. She is originally from Memphis, TN but has called several other cities home, such as Raleigh-Durham, NC and Austin, TX. As a result, her lifelong friends refer to her as the Happy Nomad.

Read more about Katina Gholson in this faculty profile

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Ravi Kalluri, MSME, MSEE, MBA, PMP, ACP, SPT, CSM. Ravi has 25 years of experience leading complex programs, with an expertise in project risk management. Currently, he serves as a Sr. Technical Program Manager at Amazon Web Services. He has previously held program management roles at Cisco Systems, Citrix Systems, Ericsson, CA Technologies, VeriSign, and Motorola. Ravi previously served as an Adjunct Faculty of Project Management in the University of California System (Berkeley, Irvine, Santa Cruz Extension campuses). He has conducted corporate trainings in Project Management for Volkswagen of America as well as taught project management and risk management courses for Northrop Grumman. His recent presentations include Project Risk Management for Business Success in a Startup Environment at PMI Silicon Valley and Enabling Collaborative Software Development in a Post-Acquisition Scenario at VeriSign Technical Symposium. Ravi received his MBA from Northwestern University (Kellogg), MS in Electrical Engineering at Stanford, MS in Mechanical Engineering at The Ohio State University, MS Certificate in Project Management from George Washington University and Graduate Certificate in Systems Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Azadeh is a principal data scientist at Genentech working on applications of Natural Language Processing in medical domain. She was previously a senior data scientist at Convoy, Inc and Microsoft, Health AI team, working on applications of machine learning and optimization. She got her Ph.D. in Operations Research from University of Houston, TX and has more than 10 years of professional experience in analytics, statistics, optimization, simulation and machine learning.

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Carolyn (aka "CeCe") Russo joined NEU in May of 2018 teaching in Boston for 5 years before moving to Northern California and joining the San Jose and Oakland campuses. CeCe believes there is so much to learn and even more to discuss about the opportunistic world we live in, especially as it relates to the intersection of data analytics and strategic management. She has served in this industry for over 35 years working across the United States in many sectors, including retail, manufacturing, brokering, distributing, consulting, and now, education. In every sector, she led the use of data and analytics to drive sales, profits, innovation, competitive analysis, annual planning and overall strategic initiatives. She is credited with having started a category optimization "University" within a Fortune 50 company and further developed strategies for using analytics in new business initiatives and entrepreneurial ventures. CeCe's hobbies are animal care, acting and voice over work. She also loves to go back "home" to the East Coast every summer.

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Amanda Welsh is a professor of the practice in the Master of Professional Studies in Analytics program. In addition to teaching, she focuses on expanding Northeastern’s collaborations with industry partners in analytics and digital research and supports the innovation and growth of analytics programs at the university’s West Coast campuses.

Dr. Welsh worked for 25 years at the intersection of big data and media, founding two data-driven start-ups—Integrated Media Measurement Inc. and Garageband.com—and serving as a Media Research Scientist at Google. Most recently, she was executive vice president, data science, for The Nielsen Company, designing and running a global data sharing program. She has published numerous articles and a book on data collection and privacy.

An award-winning video game designer and a private pilot, Dr. Welsh is executive director of the nonprofit Foundation for Scholarly Culture and serves on the board of Raising a Reader, a national literacy/family engagement program. She lives in California and teaches in San Jose, CA, and online.

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Gene Yeo is an adjunct Lecturer at Gene Yeo is an adjunct lecturer at the College of Professional Studies at Northeastern in Silicon Valley. His teaching interests include project management and construction management. He is passionate about bringing real world experience into the classroom.

Gene is a professional civil engineer and has been in the construction and engineering industry for over 22 years, managing large infrastructure projects both domestically and internationally. He holds a master’s degree in Construction Management from University at Buffalo and MBA from the University of Texas at Dallas. He enjoys traveling and exploring new places.

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Naeem Zafar is a 7X Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and a 5X CEO of startup companies, having raised over $100M in venture capital. He teaches entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley and Northeastern University and advises startups worldwide. Naeem founded TeleSense, acquired by UPL in 2022, and has invested in over 20 companies, including Luminar and Electriphi. With a degree in electrical engineering from Brown University, he began his career at Honeywell, founded XCAT, and played a key role at Quickturn Design Systems. He later led Veridicom and Bitzer Mobile, acquired by Oracle. Naeem has authored five books on entrepreneurship. Learn more at www.NaeemZafar.com.

Read more about Naeem Zafar in this faculty profile

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Katherine Hamilton is a consultant and educator, specializing in impact investing, social entrepreneurship and climate finance. She’s worked with foundations, nonprofits, government and business, such as iAlumbra, the Governor’s Climate and Forest Task Force, The Nature Conservancy and the City of Boulder. Katherine recently developed a series of Climate Finance Workshops for professionals in Mexico as a Fulbright Specialist.

She currently teaches a course on Impact Investing and Social Entrepreneurship at Northeastern University’s Semester in Silicon Valley. She has also served as an instructor at the University of Colorado Leeds School of Business, and Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

Katherine previously served as Director of Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace, a non-profit news, data, and analytics service focused on incentives for conservation. At Ecosystem Marketplace, she created the State of the Voluntary Carbon Market series and co-authored the book Voluntary Carbon Markets: A Business Guide.

Katherine holds a Master of Environmental Management from Yale University and bachelor’s from University of Michigan.

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Durham Vahia teaches courses centering on AI for business. At his current full-time position, he leads the Big Data product management team at Google, where he oversees the development of machine learning, experimentation, and analytics tools for some of the world’s largest consumer experiences.

Prior to his role at Google, Vahia held leadership positions at DoorDash and LinkedIn, where he built platforms and consumer products. He also founded an enterprise SaaS company, demonstrating his entrepreneurial acumen and expertise in building and scaling businesses.

Before his career in software, he gained valuable experience in semiconductor and hardware systems at Sun Microsystems and Oracle. His diverse background equips him with a unique perspective on the intersection of technology and business.

He holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.Read about Durgam Vahia in this faculty feature

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