Life After CIS Ph.D.

Friday, February 22, 2019 – Wu and Chen, 3-5pm
reception to follow

The Department of Computer and Information Science is hosting a panel by our PhD alumni so that students can learn about diverse career options that are available upon graduating with a PhD. These include research and teaching faculty, industrial research organizations, financial and technology industries, and Government organizations. Our panelists this year reflect this diversity of career paths. All students are welcome to attend, learn about the careers of our panelists, and ask them questions. There will be a reception at the conclusion of the panel. To help us estimate the number of attendees, please RSVP by email to brittonc@seas.upenn.edu


Diane Chi is an Associate Director at Susquehanna International Group, LLP (SIG), a global quantitative trading firm in Bala Cynwyd and a key sponsor of the SIG Center for Computer Graphics.  She currently co-heads the retail international equity desk and focuses on algorithmic equity trading.  She received her PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked in the Center for Human Modeling and Simulation with Dr. Norm Badler.


Richard Eisenberg is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Bryn Mawr College. He started at Bryn Mawr, an all-women undergraduate liberal arts college, in 2016 after graduating from Penn with his PhD. His advisor at Penn was Stephanie Weirich. Richard’s research area is in functional programming languages and dependent type systems; he is a core designer and implementor of the programming language Haskell. Before starting his PhD, Richard taught high school computer science in Massachusetts and London.


Franjo Ivančić is a Staff Software Engineer at Google in New York focusing on application security, program analysis and software development productivity tools. I am also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Columbia University in New York. Prior to joining Google, I was a Senior Researcher at NEC Labs in the Systems Analysis and Verification group in Princeton, NJ. At NEC, I developed a number of static and dynamic program analysis tools based on model checking, abstract interpretation and symbolic execution. Before that, I received a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. My dissertation research focused on the modeling and verification of embedded and hybrid systems. Earlier, I received a diploma (Dipl.-Inform.) degree from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Bonn, Germany, for my research performed at the Fraunhofer Institute in St. Augustin, Germany. My research there focused on Fuzzy Pattern Recognition, Handwriting Recognition and Machine Learning. Before coming to Bonn I went to high school at Quirinus-Gymnasiumin my hometown of Neuss, Germany, although I am of Croatian descent.


Jon Moore is the Chief Software Architect at Comcast Cable, where he focuses on delivering a core set of scalable, performant, robust software components for the company’s varied software product development groups. He specializes in the “art of the possible,” finding ways to coordinate working solutions for complex problems and deliver them on time (even in large enterprises). Jon is equally comfortable leading and managing teams and personally writing production-ready code.

Jon has a passion for software engineering, continuously learning and then teaching colleagues new ways to deliver working, maintainable software with ever-higher quality and ever-shorter delivery times.  His current interests include distributed systems, fault tolerance, building healthy and engaging engineering cultures, and Texas Hold’em.  Jon received his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania and currently resides in West Philadelphia, although he was neither born there nor raised there and does not spend most of his days on playgrounds.


Santosh Nagarakatte is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University. He obtained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. His research interests are in Hardware-Software Interfaces spanning Programming Languages, Compilers, Software Engineering, and Computer Architecture. His papers have been selected as IEEE MICRO TOP Picks papers of computer architecture conferences in 2010 and 2013. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2015, ACM SIGPLAN PLDI 2015 Distinguished Paper Award, and ACM SIGSOFT ICSE 2016 Distinguished Paper Award for his research on LLVM compiler verification. His papers have also been selected as the 2016 SIGPLAN Research Highlights Paper and 2018 Communication of the ACM Research Highlights Paper. His PhD student David Menendez’s dissertation was awarded the John C Reynolds ACM SIGPLAN Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2018.


Jonathan M. Smith is currently a Program Manager in the Information Innovation Office (I2O) at the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) on leave from the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the Olga and Alberico Pompa Professorship of Engineering and Applied Science and is a Professor of Computer and Information Science. He was previously a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories and Bell Communications Research, joining Penn in 1989 after receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He previously served as a Program Manager at DARPA in 2004-2006, and was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service in 2006. He became an IEEE Fellow in 2001.