Hailey Park, a third-year computer science student from Roswell, knows how complicated voting can be.

“There were a lot of moments when I felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information out there, and I didn’t know if the information I was consuming was factual,” she said.

Now, Park is part of the VoterTech Vertically Integrated Project (VIP), an interdisciplinary, cross-college, and student-led research team at the Georgia Institute of Technology. It works to help make it easier for the diverse student body to register and vote.

It is getting the job done with all the hallmarks of a typical Georgia Tech project: in-depth research, good organization, and technology, according to Richard Barke, a professor in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Art’s School of Public Policy and one of five instructors who mentor the VIP team members.

“The voting process is becoming technologically intense, as we’re seeing in this current iteration, so it makes sense to see what we can do using technology to address some of the problems with elections and voting,” Barke said.

As Georgia’s Oct. 5 registration deadline draws near, the team is developing technologies to help voters find information about registration, ballot information, and early and absentee voting.

“This project takes place during an important election,” said VoterTech member Caleb Torres, a third-year public policy student from Atlanta. Torres also is chief of staff for Georgia Tech’s Undergraduate Student Government Association. “Younger voters, including college students, are turning out in record numbers to the polls, and we want to help ensure every voter is as knowledgeable as possible.”

The team of 18 students has split into four groups, each working on a specific issue: One team concentrates on collecting ballot information. The second is working on voter registration efforts. Another team has built a website, https://vote.cae.gatech.edu, and the fourth is working on a smartphone app.

The website offers a simple step-by-step approach to registering to vote or voting, with vetted links to registration sites and information about requesting absentee ballots or finding polling places, in Georgia and across the United States.

It also provides links to election protection information and what to do if a voter had to cast a provisional ballot.

Veteran VIP organizer Jennifer Leavey, principal academic professional in the College of Sciences, organized VoterTech last year. Leavey is not an expert in politics but wanted to help spark excitement in voting among Georgia Tech students.

“It took a while for the students to tease out what they wanted to work on, but now they are really taking off,” Leavey said.

In addition to Leavey and Barke, the faculty and staff team includes Christopher Le Dantec, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing and the Ivan Allen College’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Recha Reid, a political scientist and interim assistant director for student innovation and undergraduate research in the Office of Undergraduate Education; and Nicole Leonard, advising and outreach manager in the Georgia Tech Honors Program.

“The work that these students have done demystifies the voting process for students,” Leonard said.

Reid noted the students’ work is already serving as a “critical hub” for their peers.

“Our VIP students have surpassed all expectations with their hard work and creativity to expand the tools we have to inform voters and increase voter turnout among Georgia Tech students,” Reid said.

The November election is far from the end for VoterTech. Le Dantec expects the experience with this cycle will give the team a clear idea of the challenges students face in engaging in elections. This data will help inform what the group decides to do going forward.

“This election season will give us a lot more runway to think more expansively about different kinds of technology solutions we might develop to help in future elections,” said Le Dantec, an expert in digital civics.

William Wilson, a second-year computer science student from Memphis, Tenn., is a member of the VIP’s registration team. He always wanted to do more to encourage students to vote and found his outlet in VoterTech.

“The reaction by students has been overwhelming,” he said. “Students seem really excited to vote, and we hope our project can add to that.”

In addition to the website, the team also is sharing information on Facebook and Instagram.

About VIPs

Students participating in Vertically Integrated Projects work in multidisciplinary teams on projects that span multiple semesters, receiving academic credit and invaluable experience as they apply their academic skills to real-world projects.

The concept was founded in 2001 at Purdue University by Edward J. Coyle, who has been on faculty in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering since 2008.

VIPs have since been adopted at 36 universities worldwide. Georgia Tech, a leader in the VIP Consortium, has one of the world’s most extensive programs.

Borrowing from electrical engineering and mathematics, they have shown how new theories can be utilized to efficiently acquire higher quality seismic surveys at costs much lower than that afforded by traditional methods. These two award winners did not directly work together, but they both benefitted from each other’s contributions and set an exemplary example of how technical success can be achieved by the interaction between academia and industry. Their efforts are establishing the new paradigm for seismic acquisition, and their innovations are deserving of this prestigious award.

Such concepts as sampling interval and aliasing have been well established, but these concepts are based on regularly discretizing a continuous signal. Irregular sampling allows CS to avoid the traditional Nyquist criteria of sampling two points per wavelength to eliminate aliasing. This opens the possibility for sparser sampling while maintaining or enhancing bandwidth and managing incoherently aliased energy. This is the basic premise of CS, but there are significant hurdles in implementing any new approach for effective use in the field. Questions such as how to acquire irregularly sampled field data, represent it in a compressed form, deblend simultaneous sources, and perform a sparse inversion to reconstruct the desired output data are among the key challenges Herrmann and Mosher have addressed successfully.

Herrmann joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 2017 as a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and as a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Energy. He holds joint appointments in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Computational Science and Engineering. While a professor at the University of British Columbia, Herrmann led the industry-supported SINBAD consortium from 2005-2017. The focus of this consortium was on applications of CS for cost reduction of seismic acquisition, seismic processing, and seismic imaging. Herrmann and his colleagues addressed sampling-related cost of seismic acquisition by using CS wavefield reconstruction methods based on randomized sampling techniques and simultaneous shooting in land and marine acquisitions. 

Through several publications, he and his team demonstrated that a signal can be represented sparsely, interference (aliasing) can be rendered into incoherent noise by random sampling, and a nontraditional optimization algorithm can recover the desired signal from the sparse representation. Key areas in which Herrmann has contributed are: seismic data processing, wave equation imaging, and full-waveform inversion (FWI). In seismic processing, he has shown that multidimensional data can either be sparsely represented using a curvelet transform or in low-rank factored form. Given these structured representations, Herrmann demonstrated how seismic wavefields can be reconstructed from severe undersamplings by promoting structure via optimization. He showed how to represent primary reflections with a sparse spike inversion, which also draws on new techniques from modern convex optimization. In wave equation imaging, he has shown how statistical sampling of shots, in combination with curvelet-domain sparsity promotion, can yield impressive cost reductions of reverse time migration and FWI. He and his team also were responsible for the development of wavefield reconstruction inversion, a new technique designed to mitigate the impact of local minima. Finally, he was selected as the SEG 2019 first-quarter/second-quarter Distinguished Lecturer to present “Sometimes it pays to be cheap — Compressive time-lapse seismic data acquisition,” which focuses on obtaining repeatable time-lapse data without insisting on replication in the field. 

Mosher and his team at ConocoPhillips have also made significant advances that are currently realizing the potential of CS in acquisition and processing. Mosher extends the windowed Fourier transform to a fast generalized windowed transform by introducing fractional decimation concepts to overcome sub-band aliasing artifacts, and this provides a sparse transform to represent data with fewer samples. He and his team developed nonuniform optimal sampling for choosing nonuniform sensor locations for seismic survey planning and prove that the new sampling strategy makes it possible to recover significantly broader spatial bandwidth than could be obtained using uniform sampling. CS data reconstruction is an important step, and Mosher and his team developed an effective seismic data reconstruction workflow. They also introduced a novel optimization algorithm for data reconstruction, which adapts the alternating direction method with a variable-splitting technique to recover a sparse representation of the seismic data. Source deblending is an important step, and they have demonstrated how this can improve seismic data quality with reduced acquisition time and cost. 

To date, ConocoPhillips and its business partners have acquired 17 CS data sets globally, including ocean-bottom node/cable, narrow-azimuth marine streamer, and land vibroseis surveys. For all the finished processing projects, the imaging results from the CS surveys exceeds the quality of legacy or neighboring surveys with traditional designs. The paradoxical result is that CS theory produces higher data quality at lower cost and in shorter time frames than would be achieved with equivalent traditionally sampled survey designs. To date, global deployments of CS technology in production have led to direct acquisition cost savings of more than US$165 million and indirect cost savings of US$180 million from optimized drilling decisions.

Led by College of Computing faculty members Ashok Goel and Spencer Rugaber, and Design & Intelligence Laboratory graduate researchers William Broniec and Sungeun An, the VERA Epidemiology project uses AI techniques to empower users to build their own visual models that simulate the impact of social distancing. The project evolved from earlier National Science Foundation-supported research on a virtual ecological research assistant that enables researchers to explore “what if” experiments about complex ecological phenomena.

The beauty of VERA is that users do not need a background in complex mathematical equations or computer programming to explore it. A high school student interested in finding out what it looks like to “flatten the curve” can log in to VERA and investigate. A parent handling middle school science lessons from home can log in to VERA and demonstrate the reason that it is important that they do lessons from home during the COVID-19 outbreak. 

For example, a user can input 16 people as the “average contacts per day per person” and see a simulation of the possible outcomes. Then, the user can lower the number of “average contacts per day per person” to 12, a reduction in social contact but not a substantial one. Upon running the simulation again, users see a marked difference in “peak cases” of 7,000 rather than 8,000, and healthcare capacity being exceeded after 20 days, rather than the original 15. Users can continue to adjust these numbers to see the impact of social distancing transform possible health outcomes before their eyes. 

“Think of VERA as a virtual laboratory that anyone can use,” said Ashok Goel, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing and the chief scientist for Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities. “The user can jump into our program and conduct ‘what if’ experiments by adjusting simulation parameters. We see education as an essential component of ‘flattening the curve’ and this is our way of providing an accessible and informal learning tool that can educate citizens about social distancing data.”  

A key component of Georgia Tech’s strategic vision for the future of education is an “inclusive and impactful education that serves the public good.” Tools like VERA provide inclusive resources that help the global community gain a greater understanding of the real-world impact of our actions during a crisis like COVID-19. 

Are you interested in trying VERA? Anyone can create an account through epi.vera.cc.gatech.edu 

The VERA project website also includes a brief user guide as well as a step-by-step tutorial about VERA. They are available at  http://epi.vera.cc.gatech.edu/docs/exercise

You can also read the new white paper about this work, “Using VERA to explain the impact of social distancing on the spread of COVID-19,” on the VERA website.

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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: Brittany Aiello

Attendees watched presentations and invited talks and participated in poster and demonstration sessions. It’s a typical academic conference in every way except for one significant change this year: it will take place entirely online, with social events hosted completely in virtual environments.

Blair MacIntyre, a professor in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing and IEEE VR conference co-chair, proposed transitioning to an all-virtual event to support social distancing recommendations related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We were planning on a small experiment with online attendees to investigate the use of VR to make conferences more accessible and sustainable. Suddenly we needed to ramp up to accommodate everyone across all traditional conference activities,” MacIntyre said.

The entire five-day event convened in Mozilla Hubs, an online platform for remote virtual experiences. IEEE VR marks the first time that a major academic conference of this scale will move online and depend solely on a virtual environment platform, including the social networking sessions that are an essential part of conferences.

The virtual experience merges video conferencing, video streaming, and online chat platforms with a custom version of Hubs. The platform operates in most web browsers, and conference attendees can join whether or not they have a VR device. As with an in-person conference, participants will watch and discuss talks, take part in parallel sessions, and network one-on-one while interacting through avatars.

The conference is taking place in Eastern Standard Time. While organizers acknowledge that it will be difficult for people in other time zones to attend, they say there are other benefits of a virtual conference such as better work-life balance.

“One of the hardest things for people to do in this sort of format is focus on the content,” said Kyle Johnsen, IEEE VR co-chair and associate professor of engineering in the College of Engineering, University of Georgia. “If you’re going to a virtual conference, you need to treat it like you’re at an in-person conference, at least during the business day. One of the huge advantages is that you still get to tuck your kids in at night, which is awesome, and we don’t want to lose that, but you do need to maintain the same level of time commitment. That’s the value of conferences.”

Social Change Through Technology
MacIntyre began exploring the use of Hubs in 2019 to address climate change and the carbon impact of long-haul flights to academic conferences. He points out that the carbon impact of a recent round-trip he took to a conference in Berlin, Germany, was higher than that of his own four-person household for an entire month.

He also views virtual experiences as a way of democratizing academic conferences, which are often limited to attendees from well-funded colleges, universities, and companies, while shutting out those who can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on travel or leave their jobs or families for a week or more.

“If we can take something like IEEE VR, which is normally around 1,000 people, and turn it into an event where 10,000 people can attend, we’ll have a much more diverse and inclusive event.”

Now, with recent global challenges of the coronavirus, technology is once again at the forefront of shaping our society – changes that we’re seeing, and living, in real-time. Whether it’s attending a virtual reality conference, working remotely, or taking a class online, “technology has the opportunity to help people connect,” MacIntyre said.

One recent example – the City of Atlanta has created an emergency fund to assist those impacted by COVID-19, $1 million of which will go toward purchasing technology to support the city’s telework deployment.

While our current crisis has forced an evolution in how we’re interacting through technology, he wonders about a permanent change in the future. “How many companies will shift to online? How many people will demand the opportunity? It will be interesting to see how we all feel after coming out of this forced remote experiment.” 

Any long-term technology transformation would mean an entire cultural shift, he said. “The technologies are there and can support remote work and education in different ways, but it only works if there’s a commitment.”

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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu) or Ben Brumfield (404-272-2780) (ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu).

Writer: Alyson Powell Key

There is a solution. You grab your phone and open Queues, an app that tells you wait times for all dining locations on campus. Now you don’t have waste your time in line – instead you get to make sure you’re fed before taking your exam.

Queues was created by Samuel Porta, a third-year Computer Science student from New Zealand. Porta has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. He started his first business selling candy on the school bus after seeing that his classmates were hungry on the way home at the end of the day. “I would find a problem and fix it.” Coming to Georgia Tech was his opportunity to create something bigger that would solve a problem.

Porta took the Startup Ideas course Fall of 2017, took Idea to Prototype Spring 2018, and was admitted into the CREATE-X Startup Launch program as a freshman for the summer of 2018. Every Tuesday he would meet with coaches and provide a weekly progress report and in turn receive feedback.

During the week, his team spent hours at the Georgia Tech Police Department (GTPD) looking at footage of students waiting in line at dining locations on campus to figure out wait times. They realized a few obstacles:

1. It takes too much time to filter through all the footage.
2. The wait times during the summer are drastically different than wait times in the fall and spring semesters.

The data collection process was too labor intensive and subject to change based on term, weather, day of the week, exam schedules, etc. They began looking into alternatives to collecting data for determining wait times.

Queues figured out that the best way to provide accurate wait times was by crowdsourcing the information. By adding an iPad with a few buttons to indicate how long you waited in line at the beginning of the line, Queues would have much more data to work with. Adding buttons to every dining location would not have been possible without a contract with the Georgia Tech Dining provider.

At the same time, the team also shifted their revenue model and focused on receiving money from the users of the app versus relying on consumers to pay for Queues. Queues learned through customer discover that providing wait times to consumers is a convenience and it is not something they absolutely need and would be willing to pay a premium for.

Queues started negotiations with Georgia Tech dining services. Porta took initiative to give a call and ask for the person in charge. With his passion, respect, and gratitude he was able to speak to the person in charge and began negotiations. But they were soon faced with another obstacle – the food services vendor changed during negotiations, slowing the process down considerably.  Typically, with contract negotiations, the general word of advice is if it takes longer than six months, it’s not going to happen, and it is not worth pursuing. But Porta was persistent. His negotiation with Georgia Tech lasted more than a year. If he hadn’t been, then Queues would have folded.  

After Startup Launch Porta decided to pursue Queues full time for a semester. “I was excited about Startup Launch and motivated by the energy of the program. I continued app development, figured out our first customer and how to deploy [Queues].” In spring of 2019, he returned to be a part-time student and part-time CEO of Queues.

Since last summer, the team has expanded from two team members to five. Porta found employees through WRECK camp, an Idea to Prototype event, a reddit post for android developers, and an old friend that took classes with him.

Queues currently has 100 users that provide feedback and they hope to have a few thousand testers and users by the end of the Spring 2020 semester.

Queues is now up and running on campus. So, what now?

“We are doing a trial period with the food service provider on campus,” said Porta. “If all goes well, the vendor already has other sites identified to deploy Queues.”

Porta reflects on his time in CREATE-X.

“The most important lesson from Startup Launch is learning to think differently about startups,” said Porta. “Startups are generally portrayed as ‘you have this great idea and then you immediately create a solution and it is perfect.’ That everyone will become the next Facebook or Microsoft. That’s how the stories are told and immortalized. But of course, it misses all the actual learning that happens along the way.”

Queues is now looking for someone with experience in Firebase or databases and data processing. If you are interested, please contact Samuel Porta at samrossporta@gatech.edu. You can download Queues now for both Android and iOS and visit their website.

One enterprising Georgia Tech student used sticky notes to get noticed by a Fortune 500 company, and he did it from the comfort of his own apartment.

Gursimran Singh, a second-year computer science major, took his internship search into his own hands.

His campus-adjacent apartment on Spring Street in midtown Atlanta is right next door to the world headquarters of NCR – a leading provider of point-of-sale technology for retail and hospitality.

Singh noticed that his apartment window actually faced some of NCR’s office and conference spaces. Using a lovely shade of gold, Singh strategically placed sticky notes on his window in reverse to spell out “HIRE ME” for the entire right flank of NCR offices to see.

He added a smiley face for good measure.

It didn’t take long for NCR to respond, using the same technology. “EMAIL?” appeared in a company window dotted with small squares of paper. Another message from NCR appeared in sticky note form asking, “DEV?”

Singh provided his email address, which took up nearly all of his floor-to-ceiling bedroom windows. “I spent a lot on sticky notes, but it looked pretty cool,” Singh said.

After sharing his contact information, Singh started getting notifications in his inbox. “I was contacted by a few people, including the vice president of IT,” Singh says. “They asked me to send my resume, so I did,” he explains. He also met with NCR’s University Relations Leader on campus.

And, however improbably his search began, Singh’s name has been added to the list for summer internship interviews.

“It was really amazing,” he says.

Update:  Gursimran has successfully landed an internship with NCR. HE participated in the Hack GT event this past weekend and won a top prize using an API provided by NCR, who was a corporate sponsor of the hackathon. The prize he received? An internship offer, which he excitedly plans to accept.

“It was a huge transition, coming from Pakistan and having never lived in the U.S.,” she said. “It was a complete change of culture. Being on my own, managing the house, and the Ph.D. on top of that was daunting. When I look back, I’m glad I didn’t know a lot of what the Ph.D. really required because I would never have gone down the path. I would have been scared off,” she laughed.

But Ahsan didn’t run away. She is graduating with a Ph.D. in computer science, focusing on computer vision, and her husband will graduate this fall with a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering, specializing in robotics.

Ahsan and Zafar were born in Karachi, Pakistan, but they didn’t know each other. They met briefly as undergraduates, but went their separate ways and graduated from different schools. She earned a bachelor’s degree in telecommunications from NED University of Engineering & Technology. Zafar attended the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) and earned a degree in electronic engineering. They didn’t keep in touch as undergraduates, but he remembered her. Years later he looked her up, they reconnected, and became engaged.

Ahsan said she had always wanted to go into academia and conduct research. She had become interested in computer vision while earning a master’s in computer and information systems, also at NED University. So, pursuing a Ph.D. was next — and she had just become engaged to Zafar, a Fulbright Scholar at Georgia Tech.

“So, of course, my top choice for a Ph.D. was Georgia Tech,” she said. “It was a seamless transition from the work I had done at the end of my master’s study.”  

Ahsan broadly describes computer vision as a way of getting machines to understand the surrounding environment.

“We try to feed, for example, photographs and videos to the computer and teach it to recognize what is happening,” she said.

She defended her thesis last fall, and in February she joined Home Depot as a data scientist on the core recommendations team. Her current project is for the Home Depot website, designing recommendation algorithms for generating collections of products for customers shopping online.

“They have a huge amount of data, and you can do interesting recommendations based on the data you have,” Ahsan said. “Thankfully, I have the right combination of skills that they needed — computer vision expertise and some natural language processing experience — so, I can combine those skills to help recommend products based on what the customer is shopping for at the moment. So far, I am really enjoying myself!”

Zafar studies robotics and is interested in designing control algorithms for generating stable, safe, and useful behaviors of robotic systems.  

His interest in robotics began during his undergraduate years. He wanted to pursue a field that has direct application and widespread support in Pakistan, because he and Ahsan plan to establish a working collaboration with their home country through academia and/or entrepreneurship.

“It won’t be difficult to have a career in robotics in Pakistan,” he said.

Ahsan said she dreams of going back into academia someday.

“I have seen successful examples of people who have one foot in academia and one foot in industry. It has worked out wonderfully for some of our faculty,” she said. “If that option opens up, I can definitely pursue that.”

Among the things Ahsan will miss most about Georgia Tech are the aura of campus life and having access to the latest research journals and papers. Zafar, who defended his thesis this month and will be hooded in the fall, said he will miss the people he worked with, conducting research, and spending time with the robots.

Ahsan said she is most excited about the Ph.D. hooding ceremony at Commencement.

“For me, it’s a very big deal because there were so many times during the program that I thought: ‘I’m never going to be able to do it.’ So, the hooding ceremony is a formal acknowledgement that I made it.”

Ahsan’s aunt from Pakistan will attend the ceremony. Her parents and Zafar’s parents will watch the livestream from Pakistan.

In the latest Times Higher Education subject rankings for computer science, the Institute is ranked seventh internationally. Tech was the top American public university on the list. Ranked just behind Stanford University, MIT, and the United Kingdom’s University of Oxford and University of Cambridge, its computer science program landed ahead of both Harvard and Princeton.

In the engineering rankings, Georgia Tech appeared in the Top 10, and was also the top-rated public American university.

The London-based Times Higher Education has been providing ranked data on international universities since 2004. Their 2018-19 research includes more than 1,250 higher education institutions from 86 nations. 

Georgia Tech’s full rankings:

Computer Science: 7

Engineering: 10

Physical Science: 44

Business and Economics: 51

Social Sciences: 72

Psychology: 100

To see the full rankings in detail, visit:

• Engineering & Technology https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2019/subject-ranking/engineering-and-IT
• Computer Science https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2019/subject-ranking/computer-science

It is no surprise that for the past five years Georgia Tech has hosted one of the largest collegiate hackathons in the U.S., or that dozens of companies have lined up to sponsor the event, including Facebook, Lyft, GM, Disney, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and NCR, among others.

This year, more than 1,000 participants from 80 different colleges and institutions gathered on the Tech campus for HackGT.

From Oct. 19 to 21, as student teams worked nonstop on formulating their ideas and developing their projects, HackGT provided workshops and fireside chats with event sponsors, as well as mentors from business and industry to share their guidance and expertise.

New to the world of hackathons? No problem. Georgia Tech’s student organizers say they wanted to create an environment in which everyone felt welcome. Forty-four percent of the attendees at this year’s hackathon were newcomers. 

Winning projects were selected at the end of three days — and they were unfailingly impressive, especially given the time constraints.

Four students from four different schools developed a tool they call Vocapture. It uses computer vision to identify objects to help English learners expand their vocabulary. The technology incorporates a smartphone camera to provide real-time text identifying the objects in view. (In one demonstration, “chair,” “desk,” “table,” and “door” appeared when scanning a classroom.)

The team noted that 2 billion people will be learning English by 2020, and hoped a tool like this might give them an advantage in honing their language skills.

A student from Auburn University spent his hackathon weekend developing a bot to write a freestyle rap on any given topic. WikiBeat uses natural language processing to scan for information from the internet and matches phrases up into couplets, then lays down a beat to match the generated lyrics.

 To learn more about HackGT and related events, click here.

Galil became dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech in July 2010. Under his leadership, the College of Computing has seen significant enrollment growth at the undergraduate and graduate levels, achievement in interdisciplinary research and thought leadership, goal-breaking fundraising efforts, and the development and continued success of the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program.

“The College of Computing at Georgia Tech has enjoyed extraordinary successes and become one of the very best in the world under Dean Galil’s leadership,” said Rafael L. Bras, Georgia Tech provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs and K. Harrison Brown Family Chair. “He has expertly guided the College through tremendous growth, and I expect that trajectory will continue during his last year of service. I am grateful we will have ample time to search for a new dean while the College remains under Dean Galil’s guidance.”

Details on the search process for the next dean will be announced later this summer.