Eighteen outstanding faculty members are joining the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
They bring expertise in areas such as virtual worlds, gaming, computational geometry, cloud databases, data security, intelligent machines, mobile health, machine learning, and more. These talented individuals will strengthen our accomplished faculty, driving innovations in computing and enhancing the educational experience, ensuring our leadership in groundbreaking technology advancements.
Joined in 2025
Teaching Associate Professor Emily Kyle Fox
Emily Kyle Fox comes to the Siebel School at Grainger Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas, where she was an associate professor of computer science. Previously, Fox was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University and Brown University. Fox is a 2013 Illinois alumnus, having obtained a Ph.D. in computer science under the guidance of professor Jeff Erickson. She joins the faculty in August 2025 as a teaching associate professor with research interests in computational geometry, computational topology and graph algorithms.
Teaching Associate Professor Daniel Gonzalez Cedre
Daniel Gonzalez Cedre will begin in August 2025 as a teaching assistant professor. He comes to the faculty from the University of Notre Dame, where he recently completed his Ph.D. He has earned outstanding teacher recognition at Notre Dame and published in ECCV, TKDE and WSDM. Gonzalez Cedre also holds an M.S. in financial mathematics from Florida State University and an M.S. in mathematics and computer science from Florida International University.
Assistant Professor Dominic Kao
Dominic Kao joined the faculty in August 2025 as an assistant professor. He was an assistant professor at Purdue University, where he directed the Virtual Futures Lab. Kao received a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, an M.S. in computer science from Princeton University, and a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Alberta. He has worked as a game developer at Electronic Arts, and his research interests are in virtual worlds, games, and education.
Clinical Associate Professor Ram Kesavan
Ram Kesavan joined the faculty in August 2025 as a clinical associate professor after extensive experience in the private sector with Google Cloud as a senior staff engineer and technical director at NetApp. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from The Ohio State University and a B Tech in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He has extensive experience in cloud databases, TL, spanner graph, and ANN search indexes.
Associate Professor Xiaojing Liao
Xiaojing Liao joined the faculty in August 2025 as an associate professor. Â She comes to Illinois from Indiana University Bloomington, where she received an Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award and an NSF Career Award. Her interests include discovering and understanding critical security issues in large systems through data-oriented security analysis and designing and developing innovative solutions to address these issues. She received her Ph.D. from Georgia Tech.
Teaching Assistant Professor Livingston McPherson
Livingston McPherson joined the faculty in August 2025 as a teaching assistant professor. They received their B.S. from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2015 and their M.S. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2018. They continued at Berkeley for a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and completed their thesis studies in 2022 by combining cognitive science with AI to create transparently safe human-robot collaborations. Now, they mentor students in research and scientific communication to discover how intelligent machines can support human understanding through active collaboration.Â
Research Assistant Professor Mashfiqui Rabbi
Mashfiqui Rabbi comes to Urbana-Champaign from Optum AI, where he was a senior principal research scientist at Optum AI, United Health Group from 2022-2025 and an Applied Research Scientist at Health AI at Apple, Inc (2020-2022). He obtained his Ph.D. in information sciences in 2016 from Cornell University. Rabbi is interested in personalized and just-in-time intervention in the mobile health space. He builds computational tools that analyze human behavior from phone data (e.g., sensors, self-input) and then intervenes in real time in ways that are personalized and contextualized to users’ needs, daily routine, and the environments they live in.
Teaching Assistant Professor Harsha Srimath Tirumala
Harsha Srimath Tirumala joined the faculty in August 2025 as a teaching assistant professor. He has been a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Michigan and obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Rutgers University. His research and teaching interests lie in theoretical computer science.
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Research Assistant Professor Jerry Talton
Jerry Talton joined the faculty in May 2025 and will be working on working on problems in machine learning and human-computer interaction. Talton was the Chief Technology Officer at Carta, managed Slack’s first Machine Learning team in the Search, Learning, & Intelligence group in Manhattan, and was the founder and CEO of Apropose, a data-driven design startup backed by NEA and Andreessen Horowitz. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, as well as B.S .and M.S. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has previously worked at Intel, Adobe, and Nvidia. Talton received the 2022 Young Alumni Achievement Award from the department of computer science. His academic research has been cited over a thousand times and has garnered several best paper awards and nominations.
Assistant Professor Ge (Tiffany) Wang
Ge (Tiffany) Wang joined the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2025. Wang’s research is in Interactive Computing, investigating the algorithmic impact on families and children and its implications for their long-term development. She is keen to explore the potential for designing more age-appropriate AI for children. Wang received a Ph.D. in computer science from Oxford University in 2025.
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Associate Professor Luyi Xing
Luyi Xing joined the faculty as an associate professor in August 2025. He has held a position as an associate professor in the computer science department at Indiana University Bloomington. Xing joined Indiana in 2018 after experience building large commercial systems at Amazon/AWS. He currently directs the System Security Foundations Lab at Indiana.
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Assistant Professor Francis Yan
Francis Yan joins the faculty with an affiliate appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He leads the Illinois Networked Systems and AI (NSAI) research group in building intelligent networked systems that are safe, robust, and performance-optimized — often through cautious and restrained integration of learning-based techniques, mindful of real-world deployment constraints. His past research has ranged from developing large-scale research platforms that lay the foundation for applying ML in systems and networking, to devising practically deployable ML algorithms. He worked as a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond. Yan earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University and did his undergraduate studies at Tsinghua University (Yao Class) and MIT.
Associate Professor Shuang Zhao
Shuang Zhau joined the faculty as an associate professor in August 2025. He arrives from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where he was an associate professor of computer science and co-director of UCI’s Interactive Graphics & Visualization Lab (iGravi). He received the NSF CAREER award in 2023. Before joining UCI, he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT. Zhao obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University in 2014. He has worked mainly in physics-based computer graphics and scientific computing with a focus on modeling and simulating light transport in complex environments.Â
Joining in 2026
Assistant Professor Kate DonahueÂ
Kate Donahue will join the faculty in August 2026. She is currently a METEOR postdoctoral fellow at MIT and a member of the AI for Society working group. Her work is on algorithmic problems relating to the societal impact of AI, such as fairness, human/AI collaboration, and game-theoretic models of federated/collaborative learning. Donahue obtained a Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University in 2024 and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard in 2016.Â
Teaching Assistant Professor Mai Elkady
Mai Elkady will join the faculty in August 2026 as a teaching assistant professor. She is currently a Ph.D. student at Purdue University, where she obtained her MS in computer science in 2018. Her research interests lie in generative models, normalizing flows, diffusion models, computational biology, and bioinformatics.
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Assistant Professor Yiling Lou
Yiling Lou will join the faculty in January 2026 as an assistant professor. She comes to the University of Illinois from Purdue University, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science. Lou received a B.S .in 2016 and a Ph.D in 2021 from Peking University. Her research interests include software testing and debugging, and their synergy with artificial intelligence and program analysis.
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Assistant Professor Nishil Talati
Nishil Talati will join the faculty in January 2026 as an assistant professor. He currently works as an assistant research scientist at the University of Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering in 2022. Talati has an MSc in electrical engineering (2018) from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and a 2016 B.E. in electrical and electronics engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science. Talati researches computer architecture, compilers, and systems software with a focus on co-designing architectures and systems for AI and data analytics.
Joining in 2027
Assistant Professor Yichun He
Yichun He will join the faculty in August 2027 as an assistant professor. Until then, she will pursue research as an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Her research explores complex biological systems across multi-scales, developing  AI, ML, and multi-agent systems solutions with applications in spatial multi-omics and brain machine interfaces to advance the understanding of biology and health. She received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in bioengineering and biomedical engineering from Harvard University and a B.E. in electrical and electronics engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China.