Stony Brook University’s Department of Computer Science has added three members to its distinguished faculty: Barbara Chapman, Kevin McDonnell, and Andrew Schwartz. These new faculty enhance the department’s expertise in the fields of compiler technology, parallel programming languages, visual analytics, and computational social science.

Professor Barbara Chapman, earned her PhD in Computer Science from Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. While there, she completed her thesis in Software Support for Advanced Applications on Distributed Memory Multiprocessor Systems. Chapman comes to Stony Brook from the University of Houston, where she was director of the Center for Advanced Computing and Data Systems (CACDS). Chapman is a pioneer in parallel computing who works to make it easier for scientists and other computer users to solve challenges. She is also the founder and CEO of cOMPunity, Inc., a community of OpenMP researchers in academia who further the work of the Architecture Review Board. In addition, she has been a member of the Multicore Association and the Global Arrays Steering Committee. Here at Stony Brook, she is now a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, and Computer Science, with a joint appointment at Brookhaven National Laboratory and affiliation with the Institute for Advanced Computational Science.

Kevin McDonnell, Associate Research Professor, has been a Seawolf for quite some time, having graduated summa cum laude from Stony Brook University in 1998 with a B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics, and Computer Science. As an undergraduate, he was a Fellow of the Honors College. McDonnell’s research continued to be recognized as a graduate student, when he was awarded a GAANN Fellowship (Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need). He earned his M.S. (2001) and PhD (2003) in Computer Science from Stony Brook and has now returned as a full-fledged faculty member. During his first semester, McDonnell taught several computer science foundational courses. His research primarily focuses on information visualization, visual analytics, geometric modeling, and user interfaces.

H. Andrew Schwartz conducted research in the acquisition of lexical semantic knowledge from the Internet at the University of Central Florida, where he received his PhD in 2011. He then moved on to a Postdoctoral Research Fellow Position at the University of Pennsylvania. Schwartz is the Lead Research Scientist for the World Well-Being Project, a co-venture between computer scientists and psychologists to study the language of social media and its effects on the physical and mental health of its users. Most of his research is similarly focused, using natural language processing and machine learning techniques to conduct language analysis on a very large scale to the benefit of the health and social sciences. Schwartz’s work adds a new level of depth to Stony Brook’s Department of Computer Science.