Introducing New Science Faculty

Twenty-two scholars in 17 departments joined the Faculty of Arts and Sciences this academic year, including five faculty members in the sciences who kick off their Dartmouth careers this winter term.  

SouYoung Jin
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

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Research Focus
My main research area is in computer vision, machine learning, and cognitive science. My area of expertise is video understanding. As a computer vision researcher, one of my ultimate aspirations is to build an AI system that can understand and respond to the richness of human experience and emotion, similar to Jarvis in the Iron Man movie.

For Fun
One thing I do every day is take pictures or videos of my daily life using my phone camera. This summer, I spent my days with my family in South Korea, and it was a fun challenge to take a good selfie with my 30-month-old nephew.

Adithya Pediredla
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

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Research Focus
My research focuses on computational imaging and computer graphics. Computational imaging systems co-design imaging and image-processing pipelines to acquire novel features of the scene, decrease the cost of the imaging system, or increase its robustness. In particular, I'm interested in adaptive sensing, depth imaging, computational microscopy, ultrafast scanning, imaging under the skin, and in building physically-based, unbiased rendering techniques for computational imaging systems.

For Fun
I like playing chess, hiking, poetry (in Telugu, my mother tongue), and Game of Thrones. (My daughter is named after the show's Arya Stark.)

Mahima Sneha
Assistant Professor of Chemistry

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Research Focus
My research focuses on watching chemical reactions happen in real time. Existing traditional experimental techniques in chemistry allow us to characterize the starting reactants and final products but not the short-lived transient intermediate species. My lab will use ultrafast lasers to trigger and probe chemical reactions over a range of timescales. Using a laser pulse as a 'pump' to initiate a chemical reaction, we can follow the rise and decay of different transient species by using a series of  'probe' laser pulses at increasing time intervals, building a detailed mechanistic and kinetic picture of the chemical reaction under study.

For Fun
I am an outdoorsy person, but I have developed a voracious reading habit since the 2020 lockdown. I am a big Murakami fan. The last book I loved reading, however, was Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.

Yujun Yan
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

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Research Focus
Broadly, my research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning (ML) and network science. My work provides theoretical understandings and empirical practices to ML models, with which we can mine complex networks under challenging real-world scenarios. My research includes providing insights into designing expressive and generalizable graph-based ML models, speeding up the learning of graph-based ML models, and customizing graph-based ML models to various domains.

For Fun
I am a globetrotter; I've been to eleven countries across three continents. I love visiting historical sites and learning about the history embedded in them.

Yaoqing Yang
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

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Research Focus
My research centers on machine learning (ML), with a focus on improving reliability and generalization in the face of uncertainty. I use ML theory and large-scale empirical analyses to study effective and robust "generalization metrics" that can dissect ML models and make these models transparent and applicable in safety-critical applications. I also work on the more applied side of ML, especially 3D point clouds and graph neural networks. My PhD thesis laid the foundation for an exciting interdisciplinary research field—coded computing—where information-theoretic techniques are developed to address unreliability in ML platforms.

For Fun
I like road trips. One thing about Dartmouth I love is that there are many natural attractions nearby. The beautiful fall foliage here reminds me of Michigan and Pennsylvania.