Education, Mentoring, and Advising

I take great joy in teaching, advising, and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students and I consider it to be one of the perks of my job.

My greatest pleasure and ultimate job satisfaction comes at those points during a course at which my students transition from simply listening and reading the material to actually understanding them, grasping them, internalizing them, and seeing how they fit within the general computer science discipline and how they are applied to solve real problems in real applications.

Teaching
My regular teaching responsibilities include the introductory course on algorithms and data structures (CSci 4041), a course on parallel computing (CSci 5451), a course on data mining (CSci 5523), and a course describing various computational techniques used in bioinformatics (CSci 5481).

In addition, I tend to teach a seminar course that explores various advanced topics in bioinformatics and computational biology (CSci 8980).

Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about these or other courses that I'm teaching.

Advising
Over the years I had the opportunity to advise and mentor many Ph.D. and M.S. students. I find this to be a very rewarding experience and I have learned (and still learning) a lot from all of my former and current students.

I believe that effective advisor-advisee relationships must be built on mutual trust, commitment, and benefit, and be designed to advance the advisees education and provide them with a solid foundation upon which to build their future career.

Pursing an advanced graduate degree and contacting research to advance the state-of-the-art is not an easy task. Its outcome is never guaranteed, there are always unforeseen complications, and not every idea works out! It requires commitment, dedication, hard work, and the ability to know when to continue pursuing a good idea even when the initial results are not very encouraging and when to stop pursing a bad idea and start over again. I do not expect my students to be expert researchers when joining my group, but I expect them to be bright, dedicated, motivated, and willing to work as hard as I do.