Meet Our Faculty

Ivan Avramovic has been a member of the Department of Computer Science as a full-time instructor since 2018, teaching programming and theory courses. He has also taught health informatics programming courses at George Mason University. Prior to academia, he worked professionally on programming and simulation projects at companies such as SAIC. His PhD research focuses on the analysis of randomized algorithms, combinatorics, and information dissemination algorithms.

Hakan Aydin has taught at George Mason University since 2001. His research interests include real-time embedded systems, low-power computing, and fault tolerance. He was a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2006. He has served on the program committee of various conferences. He was also the technical program committee chair of the IEEE RTAS 2011, and the general chair of the IEEE RTAS 2012 conferences. He received the Department of Computer Science Teaching Award in 2006 and 2009.

Foteini Baldimtsi has taught at George Mason University since 2016. Her research interests are cryptography, privacy, and data security. She focuses on designing provably secure cryptographic schemes for a variety of applications such as privacy preserving identity management, secure electronic payments and private and scalable blockchain transactions. She is a recipient of an IBM faculty award and her research is supported by NSF, NSA and the Zcash Foundation.

James Baldo's engineering career has provided him with a broad foundation of knowledge and experience in engineering systems responsible for detecting, identifying, tracking, and predicting the behavior of objects based on multiple sources of data. The environment that Baldo works in has been greatly affected by big data which has resulted in utilizing new technologies and analytical methods.

Kenneth Ball was appointed Dean of the Volgenau School of Engineering in August 2012. He previously served as the L.S. Randolph Professor and Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech from 2004-12, overseeing rapid growth in the department with research expenditures increasing five-fold to approximately $20M, and with large increases in student enrollment.

Daniel Barbará has taught at George Mason University since 1997. His areas of expertise are data mining and machine learning. He served as the program chair of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining in 2003, and he has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, the Army, and other federal and state institutions. Research 2012 - 2015 : II-NEW: An Experimental Infrastructures for Cross-domain Research in Wireless Computing, Cybersecurity and Data Mining. Funded by National Science Foundation.

Ali Beheshti is currently an assistant professor and director of Tribology and Surface Mechanics Lab. His research interests are inspired by the impending need for sustainable design and operation as well as prolonging the lifecycle of advanced components especially focusing on surface mechanics. The current objective and focus of his lab is on tribology (science of lubrication, wear and friction), and contact and interfacial mechanics at different scales.

Jonathan Bell joined George Mason University in 2015. He teaches and directs research in Software Engineering and Software Systems. His research makes it easier for developers to create reliable software by improving software testing. He has published 18 peer-reviewed papers on software testing and analysis, winning two Distinguished Paper awards (VMVM at ICSE 2014 and HitoshiIO at ICPC 2016). He is also the recipient of the NSF CAREER award. He teaches courses in distributed systems, web development, program analysis and software testing.

F. Brett Berlin's passion for new value creation is built on over 40 years of professional experience innovating and advocating for innovators applying leading edge information solutions to mission challenges. He has served with outstanding teams in various roles, including: senior strategy executive, consultant and mentor; applied information and systems technologist; collaborative leader; computer scientist and public policy entrepreneur.