New faculty appointments reinforce priority to expand world-leading teaching

The department is pleased to announce the appointment of five Associate Professors with Tutorial Fellowships (APTFs), aligning with its strategic priority of increasing the capacity and enhancing the world-leading quality of its teaching. 

The department’s commitment to increasing the number of faculty (academic staff) with joint college affiliations through Associate Professor with Tutorial Fellowship appointments is just one of its new strategic priorities, outlined this year, which reflect its drive to maintain and build on its leading position in computer science.  

The appointment of the new APTFs aims to increase capacity in undergraduate teaching, while maintaining the quality of teaching at both undergraduate and master's levels. These new positions will expand capacity within faculty to cater for the ever-growing demand for teaching at the department, whose academic offering comprises some of the most-oversubscribed courses across the University.  

APTFs are appointments that include both a college and a department component, with appointees selected and funded by both. The five new faculty members will have Tutorial Fellow responsibilities within their college, while carrying out Associate Professor roles within some of the core themes at the department.  

The new appointments, with their associated themes, include:  

Sara Bernardini (Data, Knowledge, and Action) 

Sara is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway University of London. She is also the Principal Research Scientist in AI and Data Science at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton and a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute in London. 

Amir Goharshady (Automated Verification) 

Amir is Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematics at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He leads the ALPACAS research group at HKUST and, as a theoretical computer scientist, his research mainly concerns the broad areas of programming languages and formal verification.  

Sandra Kiefer (Algorithms and Complexity Theory) 

Sandra is currently a Research Fellow in the department. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at RWTH Aachen University and at the University of Warsaw, as well as a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. Sandra’s research interests span algorithmic and structural graph theory, discrete mathematics, logic in computer science, and applications of graph theory in bioinformatics. 

Joe Pitt-Francis (Computational Biology and Health Informatics) 

Joe is already on the department’s faculty, as Associate Professor and Director of Teaching, though he will now also hold a Tutorial Fellowship at his college following his successful application. His research interests include open-source software for computational biology, parallel and high-performance computing, cardiac modelling, computational geometry and finite element meshes, and software development. 

Sergii Strelchuk (Quantum) 

Sergii joins the department from the University of Cambridge, where he is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Mathematics. He is a member of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and Centre for Quantum Information and Foundations. Sergii’s research interests lie in Quantum Computation and Information. 

These exciting new appointments not only align with the department’s priority to enhance the breadth and quality of teaching, but they also support its continued drive towards gender equality, reflected in its recent Athena Swan award. The appointment of two new women to the department’s faculty demonstrates this commitment and the panel’s efforts to ensure that the representation of female candidates was a core factor in the process.

I am delighted by the outcome of this latest recruitment drive. These are truly outstanding appointments that support our priorities and advance our vision for the continued strengthening of our teaching and research. I'd like to extend a warm welcome to the successful candidates and thank everybody who helped with the process. Head of Department, Leslie Ann Goldberg

The work of expanding the academic offering of the department will continue next year, with plans to appoint two more APTF roles, an APNTF role (in AI Ethics, shared with the Faculty of Philosophy), and a new Statutory Professor.