The People

Dr. Desh Ranjan, Director

Desh Ranjan received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science in May 1987 from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, India and his Master's and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Cornell University in 1990 and 1992 respectively under the supervision of Juris Hartmanis. After spending a year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institut fur Informatik in Germany, Desh joined the Computer Science Department at New Mexico State University as an Assistant Professor. Desh's research interests lie in the theoretical areas of computer science especially Complexity theory, NP-Optimization and Approximation and Randomized Algorithms. Desh has given several invited talks and has been a reviewer for many journal submissions.

 

Dr. Enrico Pontelli, Associate Director

Enrico Pontelli received a Laurea in Computer Science in 1991 from University of Udine, a Master in Computer Science in 1992 from University of Houston, and a PhD in Computer Science in 1997 from New Mexico State University. He has received various fellowships (in particular a three years support from EEC to achieve a Master in Computer Science) and a special award from University of Udine as recognition of outstanding thesis work. He has published more than 30 research papers. He has been peer-referee for various conferences and journals on logic programming and parallel computing. He has also served as external consultant for the EEC-funded ESPRIT project AXL. His primary research interests are in Programming Languages, Parallel Processing, Logic Programming, and Internet Computing. He maintains active research collaborations with groups in Spain, Italy, England, and Portugal.

Dr. Jing He

Jing He received her B.S. degree in mathematics from Jilin University of China in 1990. She got her M.S. degree from New Mexico State University with a major in mathematics and minor in computer science. She recieved her Ph.D. degree in Structure and Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics from Baylor College of Medicine in 2001. Her research interest is in computational biology. Particularly, she is interested in protein structure prediction

 

 

 

Dr. Joe Song

Joe Song earned his B.S. degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 1992. He later went on to earn both is M.S. (1999) and his Ph.D. (2002) from University of Washington at Seattle. His research interests are concerned with the interface between computer science and statistics. Dr. Song works be developing efficient statistical modeling and learning algorithms to compute effective a mathetmatical representation of the underlying mechanism that generates the observed data.

 

Dr. Brook Milligan

Brook Milligan’s research focuses on the interface between population genetics, ecology, and evolutionary biology. This research works to quantify the rates at which evolution proceeds and in elucidating the rules of evolutionary change of ecological or molecular traits.

 

 

 

 

 

Jessica Haebe(left), Program Coordinator and
Heather Lang(right), Web Master

Jessica Haebe earned her B.S. in Geography and her MA in Techinical Writing at NMSU. She has worked at the CREST Center since 2007 and has helped the Center go continue to grow by organizing outreach programs and ensuring the success of the NMSU Computer Science Summer Programs

Heather Lang is an undergraduate at NMSU, studying Journalism and Mass Communications. At the CREST Center, she has drafted press releases, opinion editorials, and promotional materials and maintians the CREST Website.